Direct activation of words from the Viewer in iFinger

[wernerfosch]

I would like to activate the search in iFinger dictionaries with words selected in the Viewer, for instance by double-clicking or any other shortkeys.

This topic had been arisen in this forum already in 2008, then in the context with Babylon. The result attained was: No, Babylon couldn't be activated from the Viewer.

I examined several PDF Readers whether they were able to activate iFinger's engine. Some did, others not. I always used the same PDF file. My impression is that iFinger reacts more reliably than Babylon (if!) and more Readers interact with iFinger.

Of course, there is the way of transferring a marked word into the clipboard and from there to iFinger. That is inconvenient when a constant reading flow is desired and only few words have to be translated and finally memorized in a comment window of the PDF file.

Is there any knowledge as to this subject? Principally, my preferred Reader is the Tracker Reader. It would be wonderful to get a positive answer. Shareware versions wouldn't be an hindrance.

[Paul - PDF-XChange]

HI wernerfosch,

I have spoken to my development team leader and he has explained how this works with the Viewer:

Many dictionaries applications will, to capture text on the screen, call InvalidateWindow to the window under the mouse cursor to invalidate a region of 1 pixel height, and intercepts the ExtTextOut API function to detect the text application to which it will output the mouse posiotion. It is a common technique for many dictionaries (for example ABBYY Lingvo).

Some dictionaries, like Babylon just make a screenshot of the window under the mouse cursor and use OCR. In that case we can do nothing to help such applications to detect text under the cursor.

So, in regards of iFinder, we would need their developers to contact us to explain their method of detecting text under the mouse cursor, and we will see if we can help there or not.

Sincerely

[wernerfosch]

Good solution obtained, at least in my system.

I addressed the problem to the iFinger support. From there I obtained the following answer I will paste in here:

Hello Edgar,
The iFinger double-click function is not as widely supported as we would like, I'm afraid. The most common reason for this is that a lot of programs reserve the double-click event for other purposes than simply selecting a word, and sometimes this will conflict with iFinger's functionality.
However, the keyboard shortcut should work with any application, and I would advise you to try this instead of double-click. So firstly, go to the iFinger options and uncheck "double-click". Secondly, if you would like to change the keyboard shortcut (CTRL+F11 by default), you can do this under "hot-key". Now fire up any program and double-click a word to select it and then press the iFinger keyboard shortcut.
Please let us know how it works out.
Best regards,
The iFinger Support Team

Indeed, this proposal was very helpful. Now I can get any translation desired from the Tracker PDF Viewer. The default short key CTRL+F11 of iFinger isn't convenient for my hand and so I replaced it with Ctrl+<.

May be my configuration has properties favoring this easy way, here my configuration: Win 7, 64x up to date as to MS support.

wernerfosch

[John - Tracker Supp]

Excellent - many thanks