WebVocab 1.1 review

WebVocab is a simple utility to replace words in Firefox (Greasemonkey enabled) browsers with another, user-specified, word

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Scott Olsson

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WebVocab is a simple utility to replace words in Firefox (Greasemonkey enabled) browsers with another, user-specified, word. WebVocab is intended as a vocabulary study tool/game.

If, for example, you are trying to learn your colors in Latin, WebVocab might replace all the instances of red in your web browser with the word RUFUS.

Requirements:
The Firefox web browser.
The Firefox extension Greasemonkey installed (you want this anyway, it's amazing!).
A working version of Perl installed. You probably already have Perl if you run a Unix-like OS, although it's also available for the Microsoft OS's.

Getting Started:

First, download the current version of WebVocab from sourceforge and decompress it on your machine.

Assuming you have Greasemonkey working under Firefox, just point your web browser to the local directory containing the release files and click on the file example_vocab.user.js. If Greasemonkey is properly installed, you will see an option at the top of your browser to install the example_vocab.user.js script. Install the script and you're set!

The example script just has a few types of words defined. They are the first few ordinal and cardinal numbers, a few words involving dates/times, and some colors in Latin. If you start browsing around, you should see these types of words being replaced by their all-capitals Latin equivalent.

Adding your own vocab words:

Vocab word pairs are stored in a very simple file format. It's probably easiest for you to just go look at the example_vocab.txt file included with this distribution.

Each line contains one vocab entry, where the English and Latin words (or German, Spanish, etc.) are separated by a colon (:). Comments can begin anywhere on the line with the # symbol, and lines that have no non-commented text (that is, they have no vocab entry), are simply ignored. You'll probably want to comment and use blank lines to structure your vocab files so they are easy to maintain.

Here is a small example snippet of a vocab definition file.

#some simple example vocab entries

#some nouns
bishop:antistes #this is singular
bishops:antistites #this is the plural form

#now let's add a number
fourth:quartus

Whenever you are finished updating your vocab file, you'll need to run the included generate_GM_user_script.pl Perl script. It takes two arguments: 1) the input vocab file and 2) the output user script file to create. Note that user scripts (what gets read in by Greasemonkey) MUST end with '.user.js'. If you're output file doesn't contain the '.user.js' ending, it will be appended automatically.

Assuming the generate_GM_user_script.pl works okay, point Firefox to your new user script and install as before. Your updated vocabulary should now be "translated" in the browser. Enjoy!