Typhon

Benjamin Marlé

About this app

Typhon is an e-book reader with the added capability of dictionary lookup for the Japanese language. If you ever used Rikaichan or Perapera-kun, you know what this is about. It ships with three dictionaries : edict and wordnet, kanjidic and enamdict for vocabulary, kanji and names lookup. But you can also leverage the EPWING dictionaries that you own by configuring then in the settings. It also integrates with Anki to allow you to save cards from a vocabulary entry with the context sentence from the book.

Here is a list of the features:
- Vocabulary lookup based on Edict
- Japanese Names lookup based on Enamdict
- Kanji lookup based on Kanjidic (slightly modified to accommodate Heisig index from the 6th version as well)
- Entries displayed with color coding
- Kanji lookup of an edict entry (short click on it)
- Automatic import of an entry as a flashcard in AnkiDroid if installed. It adds also the context sentence in the flashcard. (long click on the entry)
- Kanji entries display the Heisig frame number so that you know if you learned a kanji or not (surprisingly useful if you used the excellent remembering the kanji book)
- Possibility to switch between Heisig 4th and 6th numbering
- Possibility to zoom in on the entries
- Support for wordnet
- Support for EPWING

If you're wondering why I added a kanji lookup on an edict entry, I think it is useful when you get a match with a hiragana word in the text but in kanji in Edict and you're wondering what is this kanji that you saw previously somewhere.

Credits:
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Typhon is a fork of PageTurner integrating some elements of JadeReader which in turns has ported some of its features from rikaichan. And rikaichan uses Jim breen's Edict, Enamdict and Kanjidic. So it makes also use of rikaichan's deinflector data and logic without which you would not be able to search an inflected verb in a text.

- PageTurner: http://www.pageturner-reader.org/
- JadeReader: https://bitbucket.org/rayzhou/jaderead-restart
- Polarcloud: http://www.polarcloud.com/
- Jim breen's page: http://nihongo.monash.edu/japanese.html

Since I modified quite a lot the original dictionary code from JadeReader, I decided to publish it as a Java library called JRikai adding support for Kanjidic amongst other things.

This work is published under the GPLv3 license following the compatibility rules with the licenses used by the software Typhon is based on.

Source code:
Typhon :https://github.com/benjamarle/typhon.git
JRikai : https://github.com/benjamarle/jrikai.git

Ratings and reviews

Really love this app for what it does. It's the only epub reader with an integrated dictionary that correctly finds word boundaries and lets you look up words no matter where in the sentence they are, and no matter what endings they have. I just wish the developer would get back to it and fix some of the big bugs (furigana working only on a few books, bookmarks can be saved but there's no way to navigate back to a bookmark; when you select the list view in the library, the app crashes and won't start anymore and needs to be reinstalled).

For Japanese learners, this is the best way to read e-books. There is no other reader that comes even close to the convenience of Typhon with the included dictionaries. The only downside are some minor usability problems. Mostly, I would like to have pages instead of a scrolling text. It's also way too easy to accidentally switch to the next chapter. But overall, I cannot think of a better reader for Japanese books.

Almost perfect, missing only a quality of life feature I'm used to from jade reader: the option to have the dictionary hide itself again when you scroll.

What's new

+ Experimental furigana support (activate in the settings)
Bug fix for furigana :
- The color of the furigana is taken from the color of the text
- The can have several tags now