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Request for Comments: Drag & Drop Text Format

Say you’ve done a search in Tensai and now you want to drag & drop some entries into a text editor as plain text. In 0.92 and earlier doing this would net you some weird URL type thing like tensai://JMdict:ent_seq@entries/;1405810. Well no longer! Say you’ve got a result that looks like this:

What I’m planning for 0.93 is to make it so you can drag and drop the result above into a text editor and get:

【耐える】たえる
【堪える】たえる、こたえる、こらえる
【怺える】こらえる
» one-step verb
1. to bear; to stand; to endure; to put up with
2. to support; to withstand; to resist; to brave (たえる only)
3. to be fit for; to be equal to (たえる only)

【堪えかねる、堪え兼ねる、耐兼ねる】たえかねる
» one-step verb
1. to be unable to endure; to lose patience

ちゃんと
» adverb, noun, ~suru verb
1. perfectly; properly; exactly

【遠慮】えんりょ
» ~na adjective, noun, ~suru verb
1. diffidence; restraint; reserve

What I’d like to know is, how would you prefer to have the above text formatted? I’m particularly curious to know if anyone can think of a readable way to show complex entries like the first two on a single line.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 at 6:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

9 Responses to “Request for Comments: Drag & Drop Text Format”

  1. Joe Says:
    March 2nd, 2006 at 8:35 pm

    I think that looks great as is! Perhaps you could have a tab-delimited option for people who want to ‘wrap their own’ — that’s an easy format to manipulate.

  2. Justin Says:
    March 2nd, 2006 at 9:13 pm

    I can see delimiting ちゃんと and えんりょ with tabs, but how would you delimit entries with groups of kanji and readings or multiple definitions like 堪える、絶える、耐える? They’re essentially multi-dimensional data, so I wouldn’t have thought that tabular text could express them.

  3. David Says:
    March 3rd, 2006 at 5:37 am

    Looks good and seems to suggest the capcity to make some drag and drop quiz materials. What I might suggest is that you could have options to change what part of the entry is the focus an dtherefore appears first. If the English definition is what is important for your particular search you might be able to make it so that the English text appears first (and all logical permutations that would follow).

    By the way Glad to see you’re still working on it!

  4. Justin Says:
    March 4th, 2006 at 12:32 pm

    I think it’d be best to have just one way to represent dragged entries as text, and provide more options in a separate “Export…” menu item. So for just this I want to choose the single most intuitive and expected textual format to represent dragged entries.

  5. Michael Says:
    March 8th, 2006 at 8:41 pm

    First off, as this is my first post — this application is way cool! ありがとうございます！

    OK, I may be one of the few people who actually use this, but I actually would like to be able to still have access somehow to the xpath information that you currently get with dragging (maybe this goes in preferences???). I won’t cry too hard if it goes away but just noting that I do like that option.

    I also like the idea Justin proposes for an “Export…” item (perhaps available as a hot key or button on the GUI for those who use it a lot). Perhaps you would get to choose among multiple formats for export as well. Maybe a few basic options (delimited, plain text, HTML) or even allow the user to specify an XSLT file to transform the content as they like.

  6. Justin Says:
    March 8th, 2006 at 9:35 pm

    Glad you like Tensai, Michael!

    Actually, dragged entry URLs aren’t XPath statements. An XPath statement for a JMdict entry would be like “.//entry[ent_seq=1405810]”. I just made up the tensai:// URL format due to technical limitations in old versions of Tensai. But you’ve piqued my curiosity now — how are you using those URLs?

    Don’t worry, I’m definitely including the ability to choose custom XSLT files.

    And Justin == the developer == me. I take all of my own feature requests seriously. :)

  7. Karl C.H. Lin Says:
    March 27th, 2006 at 6:15 pm

    I’ve just started to learn Japanese. I downloaded this software and found it very useful. Thanhks a lots.

  8. RiceKicker Says:
    April 9th, 2006 at 9:35 am

    Hi Justin,

    Shucks, sorry I’ve been out of touch. I made my comment and hadn’t checked back until now. Sorry!

    I’ve been developing a Japanese study aid in Python which digs through the JMDict format. I guess that’s where I though the raw lookup information would be useful (note, I haven’t done anything with it yet which is one of the reasons I didn’t realize realize your URL was not an actual XPATH statement =)

    Anyhow, if you’re including a custom XSLT ability, I’m jazzed! Way cool!

  9. RiceKicker Says:
    April 9th, 2006 at 9:36 am

    By the way, “RiceKicker” is “Michael” a few posts above =)

    (Didn’t apparently set the correct display name =)

    Thanks!

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