Coditra

A translator’s companion for desktop. Select fragments of a text document and quickly look them up in online dictionaries

Coditra is a locally run web application intended as support in translation of text. Its main feature are quick dictionary lookups, whereby results are pulled from various online dictionaries and presented in a clear form directly in the user interface.

Coditra comes with several built-in lookup sources. Adding a custom source requires writing an adapter and compiling it together the server portion of the program as well as writing a UI component for the client portion of the program to display the results.

Supports Linux, Windows, and (theoretically — untested) macOS.

Built with Go and Svelte.

Installation

Binary releases are not currently available. The program must be built from the source:

Requirements: Yarn 1 (or equivalent), go.

1. Clone

   git clone "https://github.com/fauu/Coditra"
   

2. Build the client

   cd Coditra/client
   yarn install
   yarn build
   

3. Build the server

   cd ..
   ./scripts/server-prebuild.sh
   cd server
   go build -o target/coditra cmd/coditra/main.go
   

The self-contained executable for the program is now ready at server/target/coditra[.exe].

The web interface will be accessible at http://localhost:1291.

Configuration

On first launch, the program will create a default configuration file (config/config.sample.nt) in:

Linux
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/coditra/config.nt (usually ~/.config/coditra/config.nt)

Windows
%APPDATA%\coditra\config.nt (usually C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\coditra\config.nt)

macOS
~/Library/Application Support/coditra/config.nt

Before using Coditra, this file must be edited: a value for the key documentsDir must be specified.

File format

The configuration file is a NestedText file. Below is an annotated example describing its expected shape.

# Path of the directory containing HTML documents to be read by Coditra
documentsDir: /home/<user>/documents/translation-texts
# The user agent used by the lookup adapters to access internet resources. When
# this entry is absent, a defualt defined in the file `server/config.go` is
# used
userAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/99.0.4844.51 Safari/537.36
# Simple lookup sources that do not need to be programmed as all they do is
# open the specified URL in a new browser tab
lookups:
  -
    # Used to refer to this source in other places in the configuration file
    id: bob
    # Displayed in the user interface
    name: Bob
    # {input} is substituted with the user’s query string and the resulting URL
    # is navigated to in a new browser tab
    url: https://www.google.com/search?q={input}
    params:
      # Determines the flag displayed in the corresponding button in the UI
      sourceLang: fr
# Sets of lookup buttons displayed on the left side of the lookup panel
setups:
  -
    # Displayed in the UI
    name: Français 🡒 Polski
    # List of buttons
    lookups:
      # Refers to the entry with id `bob` defined in the `lookups` field above
      - bob
      # Refers to the key referencing the wordreference.com lookup source as
      # defined in the `LookupSources` map in the file `server/server.go`. "fr"
      # and "en" refer, respectively, to the `sourceLang` and `targetLang`
      # parameters which are handled in the lookup source implementation (in
      # this case in the `server/lookups/wr.go` file).
      - wr(fr, en)

Input documents

Coditra uses HTML files as input. For best results, however, a Markdown file should be fed to it first in order to produce a HTML file specifically tailored for use with it. This enables features that make it easier for you to remain oriented within the text while constantly context-switching between it and the lookup results. Specifically, those features are: displaying each sentence in its own paragraph and letting you highlight a sentence you are currently working on by clicking on it.

To convert a Markdown input file to a prepared HTML file, run:

coditra --prepare <filename>.md <filename>.html

Usage tips/notes

• Initiating text selection by with double click instead of a single click makes it snap to full words.

• You can use pandoc to easily create an input Markdown file directly from a text selection made in web browser. For example (Linux Wayland version):

  wl-paste -t text/html | pandoc -r html -w markdown-raw_html-native_divs-native_spans-fenced_divs-bracketed_spans > <filename>.md
  

• Successful lookup requests are cached in memory until the program is restarted.

Known issues

• SJP PWN lookup: some results as well as “internal” cross-references not picked up. For example of both see https://sjp.pwn.pl/sjp/szukaj/mistrz (under “wielki mistrz”).

• Lingea lookup: unhandled cases: https://slowniki.lingea.pl/wlosko-polski/nella, https://slowniki.lingea.pl/francusko-polski/la (lex_ful_desc2).

Development

Terminal #1:

1. go install github.com/cortesi/modd/cmd/modd@latest or pacman -S modd etc.

2. cd server

3. modd

The program will automatically rebuild and relaunch on any .go file change.

Terminal #2:

1. cd client

2. yarn dev

The client will be hot-reloaded on modification.

In development, be sure to access the web UI through the address http://localhost:5000, and not localhost:1291, as the latter address will contain a stale version of the client, not the fresh one served by the development server.

Adding new Lookup Sources

1. Create a new .go file in server/lookup/. You need to implement the type Source defined in server/lookup/lookup.go. Refer to other files in server/lookup/ for examples.

2. Add an entry for your source to the LookupSources map defined at the top of the RunServer() function in the file server/server.go.

3. Create a new <Lookup Source Name>LookupResult.svelte file in client/src/lookup. You need to implement a Svelte component that receives a lookupResult prop with the data returned by your Go code. Refer to other files in client/src/lookup for examples.

4. Add your component to the sourceToLookupResultComponent map defined near the top of the client/src/LookupPanel.svelte file.

5. Build the program as described in the Installation section.

License

Coditra
Copyright (C) 2020-2022 Piotr Grabowski

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Third-party components

Coditra includes the following third-party components: