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About All-In-One Page CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary

All-In-One Page CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary was initially created because I wanted to know how the web server had to be configured to correctly serve web pages in different character sets. While I was looking for Unicode fonts and information on how to configure the web browser I encountered into CEDICT dictionary files. These files are encoded in GB and Big5 character sets, and I thought that they would be perfect raw material for my experiments.

Because my Chinese was pretty much limited in saying "Ni hao" (It's not much better nowadays) I had to visually compare that the browser view and CEDICT are identical. To do so, I had to install a "Chinese system" to my computer. These external programs make it possible to view Chinese on a non-Chinese Windows. Unfortunately these programs turned out to be quite prone to crashes, and in some cases it was impossible to install them in a university computer laboratory environment.

I thought that there must be other people who are equally frustrated in installing extra programs to their computers, but who occasionally need to check a word or two from a Chinese dictionary, online or offline. So, I decided to polish my work a little bit and put it to the net. The liberal licence of CEDICT made this possible. This same licence is also applied in copying and distributing All-In-One Page CEDICT Chinese-English Dictionary.

Because I had some previous experience with pinyin characters, I decided to try to convert the tone numbers into a format where the tone marks are placed above the correct character. This turned out to be an interesting Perl programming exercise. Only after the GB encoded Simplified Chinese version was ready I noticed that there were no necessary characters in Big5 character set. This is why guo2, for example, is converted to either guó or guo/ depending on which version is checked. These converted versions are placed between "{" and "}". All errors between these brackets are solely mine, and I would be grateful if you could report them to me.