By WHAT do you (in parallels) structure? (woof-woof!)

Posted by 22111
Sep 3, 2022 at 01:01 PM

Immediate follow-up to my post some minutes ago:

Re WordWeb:

In fact, I commented on bits:

“After buying WordWeb Pro, I had to realize that I had lost my money (20$ (EDIT: 19$) plus VAT), since all the dictionary web sites I had been interested in, were rendered in a way that didn’t make their info readily available to me, and with an ad defender, it outright got impossible; I had to realize that obviously, the developer had selected the freely-available sites (free/trial, non-“Pro”) in a way that those problems didn’t appear before making my purchase decision.

(I obviously speak of the “standard”, English, two-language and one-language dictionary, and thesaurus sites you will want to use this alternative browser interface with, not of “exotic” sites with possible non-standard, additional problems.)

Thus, your task of quick-n-easy, concurrent access to several standard web dictionaries for the same search term will unfortunately not be met by WordWeb Pro, you will have to write some little macros instead, so my hint for you here, don’t try to interact with the searchbars of those sites but analyze their respective search URLs after having fired up their regular search, then write your macro(s) accordingly - and you should get 1-key navigation between your browser tabs, and a little macro getting you to some “homepage” of your own as your search “home base” (then “close other tabs”, in order to fire off the whole set again with your next search term, but without closing your browser in-between); as an intermediate solution, there are free browser add-ins (of very different quality though) which direct your input into the respective site searchbar, without fiddling with the mouse in case.

As for non-web dictionaries, etc., there always Oxford Shorter Dictionary, Chambers Thesaurus (30/10$ on MS), as well as the multiple UltraLingua dictionaries (12$ each, e.g. Eng-Spanish/French and vice versa and many more), all of them are a steal in their own way (the UltraLingua dictionaries are WAY beyond of what you’d expect for 12 bucks), and I can speak about them, as well as of WordWeb Pro since I all own them (for UL, the language combis only I’m in need of, of course), with buyer’s remorse just for the latter.

The “ideal” solution would be to get out just the core info from the web sites, but whilst you could do that individually, no developer may sell such a tool, for obvious legal reasons; presenting an inferior, alternative browser being not a real alternative… but kudos to the developer to have hidden that core info from me, by very neatly selecting the sites available in his tool before buying: smart guy indeed!

Oh, sorry, that wasn’t on purpose, no, no, no - it was just his good luck and my bad one. Oh yeah.”

= https://www.bitsdujour.com/software/wordweb-pro/in=search

Thus:

In their trial / free version, they just had included web pages that didn’t (allegedly: don’t) present the above-mentioned problems, whilst then, after buying that thing, I had to realize my purchase had been worthless; I subsequently also commented on some other - now literally defunct, quality-wise - “forum” (which has, in-between, more or less become a “Kindergarten, Kindergarten, Kindergarten!” - your pardon: “Zettelkasten, Zettelkasten, Zettelkasten!!!” ADVERT) about such - sometimes just dumb (e.g. I have trialed “File Locator” years ago, so I cannot trial it anymore, albeit it might have become somewhat better in-between) - “trial” strategies, but which more often than not are “very well designed”, in order to “get” you, see https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=43835 .

I suppose that with real hard work, javascript, etc., you could get some really immediate access to web translation (or other such) results, but it’s certainly not WordWeb, paid, which’ll do that for you.

This being said, among other “text tools” software, I own “Chambers Thesaurus” and “Shorter Oxford Dictionary”, and which are both fantastic value-for-money, both for their sheer and simply wonderful content (sic! Oxford being thrice the price of Chambers, but both are worth every penny you spend on’em), and in spite of the fact that (MS “app”‘s) “Chambers”’ code obviously has been been done by WordWeb’s developer, I recommend it, as well as “Oxford Shorter” - both “apps” (“Oxford Shorter being by “MobySystems”, not also by “WordWeb”) are obscene in their respective disdain of users’ user-comp interaction needs.

In fact, I ran AutoHotkey, again, on both, and in the usual way then, i.e. AHK first analyzing the “situation”, THEN only triggering the necessary button presses, so the user-interface interaction is now “acceptable” for me, but then and obviously, they must think their paying users - of which more than 90 p.c. withhold themselves the chance to run some really elaborate macro tool onto these nuisances, by way of, cf. supra, low horizon - are really nuts.

An’yes, the most elaborate trial cripplings I’ve ever seen in my life, that’s, for the time being, XMLSplit (99 bucks, which will soon be 300€ including VAT)...

Well then, the Mezzogiorno has got it’s Mafia, and we all now here in Western Europe have got the EU…