niinii

This project is a work-in-progress.

Demonstration

niinii (knee-knee) is a graphical frontend for glossing Japanese text. Useful for assisted reading of text for language learning purposes. A primary use case is glossing visual novels, which is shown in the demonstration above. I made this tool with the express intent to read a single specific visual novel, which is also where the name comes from. If someone else finds it useful that's cool too.

For example, in the demonstration above, I use niinii along with a text hooker to gloss the dialogue in a visual novel. The segmented phrase along with ruby text (i.e. furigana) is displayed. Hovering over a segment will show dictionary definitions and inflections from JMDict. You can pop open a separate window by clicking on a segment. Hovering over kanji will show kanji information from KANJIDIC2. I would write a more detailed user manual but I think you can probably figure it out.

Japanese language support is implemented using Ichiran by tshatrov. Ichiran is pretty amazing at text segmentation compared to other tools I've tried.

Why not use...

This is a tool created to service a personal need, and may not be useful to you. Below, I laid out my personal justification for investing time into creating this tool. If you agree, then this tool may be useful for you.

Why not use MeCab, JParser, ChaSen, Jisho etc.?: In my experience ichiran is much better at segmentation, provides more metadata, and makes fewer mistakes.

Why not use rikai(kun|chan), JGlossator?: They don't do segmentation.

Why not use DeepL, Google Translate, etc.?: I want a gloss, not a translation tool. If I ever integrate translation features, I'd like to do so in a way that supplements the gloss rather than dumping text.

Why not use the web frontend ichi.moe?: There are some features I'd like to experiment with to improve the glossing experience.

Build

Prepackaged builds are available in the Releases section of this repository.

The only target that is properly maintained is x86_64-pc-windows-msvc. There's nothing stopping it from working on other targets (e.g. Linux), but additional work may be required.

To build the application from source on Windows:

# install vcpkg
git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg
.\vcpkg\bootstrap-vcpkg.bat

# install freetype
vcpkg install freetype:x64-windows-static-md

git clone https://github.com/Netdex/niinii.git
cd niinii
cargo build --release

If using the hooking feature, the bitness of the DLL must match the target application. To build a 32-bit application:

cargo +stable-i686-pc-windows-msvc build --target i686-pc-windows-msvc --release

For Japanese language support, the following additional components are required:

• ichiran-cli (Ichiran)
• PostgreSQL installation with Ichiran database

You must provide the location of these additional components in the Settings pane of the application.

Given that the process of building these components for use with niinii is quite involved, prebuilt versions are included with the prepackaged builds.

Known Issues

High CPU usage when out of focus

Seems like a problem with winit. niinii is almost always used in the foreground anyways because of always on top, so I'm not going to bother fixing this.

Hooking not working

• Most visual novels are written in engines which use D3D9. This is not always true though, you may need to adjust the hooking code as necessary.
• There is limited recovery code for when frame buffers are resized, devices are reset, contexts are changed etc. This may lead to breakages when switching in and out full-screen mode, resizing the window, and switching to another application.
• Some visual novel engines will present only when necessary rather than at a fixed framerate. In this case, niinii won't work properly since it expects a fixed refresh rate.

Issues with Chromium-based browsers

In overlay mode, niinii displays a transparent window which covers the entire screen. Newer Chromium-based browsers have a feature which suspends drawing when the window is fully occluded, for performance reasons. The window displayed by niinii counts as full occlusion despite being transparent, which causes Chromium-based browsers to suspend drawing. I suspect this could also happen with some Electron apps, but I haven't tested it.

Troubleshooting

TODO

Third-party

See NOTICE for a list of third-party software used in this project.