About JGloss

JGloss is an application for adding reading and translation annotations to words in a Japanese text document. This can be done automatically and manually. When a text document is first opened, words will be looked up in dictionary files and the first reading and translation (if any) is used to annotate the word. The user can then edit the annotations: choose among the readings and translations found in the dictionaries, enter own readings and translations, remove annotations and add new annotations. The document can be exported as plain text with annotations, HTML (with support for the Ruby Annotation XHTML specification) or LaTeX.

The application is designed as a translation aid for people learning Japanese. With some new document, you can first skim the text and change the annotations to match the likeliest meaning of the word. Then you can print/export the text with annotations and start working on the details of understanding the text without having to resort to a paper dictionary all the time.

JGloss is written in Java and should work on any computer with support for a recent Java version. It is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

JGloss Information Links

The JGloss mailing list is the central discussion forum for all JGloss users and developers. It is open to everyone interested in JGloss. You can post questions about installation and usage, discuss how you currently use JGloss and suggest in what direction the application should be going. To encourage people to post, writing in any language is allowed.

The mailing list is also available as internet newsgroup, thanks to the gmane mail-news gateway. To access the list, point your favorite newsreader to news server news.gmane.org, group gmane.comp.java.jgloss or access the newsgroup with your web browser.

Acknowledgements

JGloss owes many ideas to Jim Breen's work, particularly the WWWJDIC and XJDIC. The kanji parser is based on ideas from the WWWJDIC. The character encoding detection uses code from Yasuhiro Tonooka's kcc (Kanji Code Converter). The French localization is contributed by Alexandre Beraud. Heinrich Künsting helped with the LaTeX export template design and wrote the LaTeX-CJK list template. Some of the file chooser icons are taken from the KDE project.