Re: Dictionary Programs?

On Wednesday 28 August 2002 07:32, Mau Rauszer wrote:
> I've recently surfed looking for a dictionary creating program and I found
> a very nice one, called Quick Lookup. It allows HTML content so even you
> can use different fonts and so on. It uses mxd format - well i don't know
> if that's only used by this program - and only a 600k exe file! You can
> edit manually the word adding notes or etymology.
        It certainly looks nice, but it has several strikes against it. Both the code
and the format are proprietary, which means that you can neither expand the
program to do more (or hire someone to do it for you) and your dictionary is
locked into one form that cannot be converted to another or altered except by
the original program itself. I've learned the hard way that this is the most
important part about data files: if the data is not saved either as text or
in some standard form, it's quite possible, indeed, almost certain that
within five to ten years, that data will no longer be accessable to you. As
far as I can tell, the mdx format is their own invention. Lastly, it doesn't
run on Linux or Mac, and the dictionary maker runs only on Windows.
        :Peter