aarddict (Aard Dictionary) is a multiplatform dictionary and offline Wikipedia reader.

It was originally designed for Nokia Internet Tablet devices (N800/N810), but it also runs on desktop Linux, Windows, and it should be possible to run it on any platform where Python, PyGTK and ICU are available. Aard Dictionary is under active development and is not a stable software. However it is already very usable.

aarddict's home page: http://aarddict.org


Product's homepage

Here are some key features of "aarddict":

· Handles very large dictionaries
· Fast word lookups
· Efficient, highly compressed dictionary data storage format
· Lenient word searching (case insensitive, ignores accents)
· Language specific word list sorting
· Unicode everywhere
· Look up words in multiple dictionaries in multiple languages without switching
· Rich article formatting
· Internal and external references, footnotes

Requirements:

· Python

Limitations:

· No support for images. This also means mathematical formulas in Wikipedia articles are missing.
· Table support is limited. Complex tables may miss some data and/or have incorrect structure. Also there is no text wrapping inside table cells, which produces very long horizontal scrollbars in some articles.
· Internal references to a specific location inside an article do not work.
· Many XDXF dictionaries have only basic or no markup in articles. Accordingly, aard dictionaries converted from such XDXF also have just plain text articles. Some dictionaries have simple plain text markup or formatting conventions that can be converted to proper XDXF and aard markup, but this requires a custom conversion tool which hasn't been written yet.