Vocaboly.com

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Are there any shortcuts for composing source files for new books? Say you want to create a large book containing several hundred, or even a few thousand, words and definitions. I imagine it would be a long and tedious task to format the text file with all the appropriate markings - colons, brackets, number signs, and so on.

This must be an issue you've considered. I mean, when you created Vocaboly's default books for TOEFL, GMAT, SAT, GRE, with 10,000+ definitions, it's hard to believe you coded the source files manually, word by word. Did you automate the process with a script of some sort? And if so, have you considered integrating that automation into future releases?

Anyway, I've been experimenting with a lot of learning-related software demos out there, and from what I've seen so far, I must say yours is one of the most intuitive, aesthetically pleasing, and bug-free interfaces I've seen. Excellent work!

[Support]

Thanks for your nice words about our software!

We wrote small programs to do some conversion work, but only when we have the words in other formats, like VOA special English wordbook. The conversion program was only valid for this book and was discarded after doing its job. Anyway, someone has to input the words, programming can only check the format and do the conversion, that's trivial compared to the real work.

On our German website, we have around 14,000 sample sentences and 15,000 slang, terms and phrases, they were all done by hand. The translation part takes much more time than typing, it sounds scary but, it's feasible if you don't expect to finish within days.

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Thanks for the quick reply!

You know, I realized something earlier today. Excel would work great for creating source files. For instance, let's say I had a text document with a thousand words, definitions, parts of speech, sentence usages, and so on. I could import the document into Excel such that each word has its own row, and each piece of the word's data has its own column. By creating empty columns in the right place, and using the Fill Down option, I would save a lot of time. For instance, instead of manually inserting a colon between each word and definition, I would create an empty column between the word and definition columns. Then I would put a colon in the first row of the new column, and use the Fill Down menu. Saves me from typing a thousand colons. Then I could do the same for the other necessary coding, such as inserting brackets and number signs and so on. Then I simply save the spreadsheet as a text document and import.

It's an obvious solution, I suppose, but I wanted to post it for others who might not think of it right away.

Here's another question: Have you thought about allowing users to save books as source files? For instance, if I wanted to work with the source of someone's book, and integrate parts of it into my own work? The obvious benefit is increased flexibility. The downside is that the hard work of book-making will be easier to rip off. Just a thought.

[Support]

Thanks for sharing your Excel tips, I believe it's also helpful to other users.

If you have some kind of vocabulary files already and want to convert to Vocaboly book source files, we may be able to do it for you by programming, but we require that you would like to publish the created books on our website.

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[Support]