The EPWING format
(Please note: most links lead to Japanese pages! Non-Japanese pages are
marked with a small flag indicating the language.)
The EPWING (Electronic Publishing WING) format is one of several formats
for electronic publishing in particular electronic dictionaries.
Development of the format started during the 1980s. In 1991 the
EPWING Consortium was formed by
Fujitsu, Sony,
Iwanami and other
Japanese IT and
publishing companies. In 1996 EPWING
was standardized as JIS (Japanese Industry Standard) X4081 and revised in
2001.
The EPWING format exists in several
versions
including such features as sound, movies, compression, etc. and offers
various search
methods. In principal,
versions are backward compatible but not forward compatible, that is
software conforming to lower version numbers are able to exploit only
features of that and earlier versions.
| EPWING versions |
| V1 |
character representation, b/w illustrations, audio
playback |
| V2 |
color graphics, sound compression (WAV) |
| V3 |
MPEG-1 movies |
| V4 |
data compression, hard disk installation |
| V5 |
JPEG, numerical formula display |
| V6 |
high data compression, index size reduction |
| ST |
support for color graphics and continuous audio
playback |
| Supported Search Methods |
| headword search |
both in forward and backward dicrection |
| conditional search |
search with multiple keywords |
| composite search |
select multiple keywords from a category menu |
| cross search |
search among (multiple) headwords |
| menu search |
usually text with hyperlinks |
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EPWING viewer and dictionary software and utilities for various operating
systems. For a more comprehensive list have a look at Maximilk's viewer
page.
- Sharp Zaurus: zten
(original version
or newer enhanced
version)
- Linux/FreeBSD/etc. with GTK:
EBview,
Nabeta,
GxDic.
KDE2:
KEBook
- MacOS(X): JEdict,
Kotonoko,
Jamming (Shareware),
CeDar,
Shokendai
- Windows: DDwin,
Jamming (Shareware),
EBview,
EBWin,
Nabeta,
- PocketPC/WindowsCE:
EBPocket
- PalmOS:
Buckingham EB Player
(via archive.org),
(some info for
PalmOS users)
-
BTRON3:
EBI
-
Emacs: Lookup
via eblook
-
Vim: eblook.vim
via eblook
- Commercial
products, some of them bundled with dictionary CD-ROMs.
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Tools and Utilities for manipulation and creation of EPWING formatted
files.
-
FreePWING:
a free Perl library (GPL license) for conversion to EPWING format.
Supports forward/backward search, conditional search, links, menu,
copyright, gaiji (characters outside EUC-JP encoding), color pictures,
sound (undocumented).
-
MarkupInterface.pm as part of my
Perl conversion scripts: control
functions from the
FreePWING
library via a simple markup language.
-
EBstudio
(Shareware): a Windows program to create EPWING and EB* formatted files
from "HTML" (some tags added), XML, PDIC, and other formats.
-
EB
library and utilities:
a library to access EPWING and EP* (denshi book) formatted files.
Utitlities (output in English) included are ebappendix (manipulate
appendix), ebfont (extract gaiji and save as XBM), ebinfo
(book info), ebrefile (reconstruct catalog file),
ebstopcode (stop code analyser), ebunzip (uncompress),
ebzip (compress), ebzipinfo (compression info). Viewers such as zten, EBview, GxDic, Kotonoko,
WordSeeker use this library.
-
EBNETD:
three network servers for EPWING and EB* dictionaries: ebnetd
(EBNET protocol usable by EB library applications), ndtpd
(Network Dictionary Transfer Protocol), ebhttpd (HTTP protocol).
-
WinEBZip
(Windows) and
DicCompressorJ (MacOSX): GUI frontends for ebzip (see above).
-
ebutils (Japanese output):
bookinfo (general information about honmon file),
catdump (clear text<–>binary conversion of the catalog
file), squeeze (remove unwanted sections like sound data,
video data, or unused search methods).
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Hannes Löffler
Last modified: Fri Nov 9 10:59:34 JST 2007
