Lookupper 2.0

Lookupper now ships an offline translation engine — Google TranslateGemma 4B. The model downloads once and then runs on your own machine.

• No internet needed, and your free cloud translation quota is untouched. Entirely.
• Two builds: one for the CPU, one for the graphics card. Before downloading, Lookupper checks whether your machine can handle it and says so if it can't.

The translator used to outline each paragraph and make you click them one by one. Now a single press translates the entire screen.

• Cursor on nothing — the whole screen is translated. Cursor on a block — only that block.
• And it costs less: a whole screen is one cloud translation. Before, every paragraph counted on its own.

Dictionaries are now read by Lookupper's own engine.

• Your own dictionaries import in the same four formats as before: StarDict, ABBYY Lingvo (.dsl and .dsl.dz), MDict (.mdx) and Aard 2 (.slob).
• Seven formats the engine could never read have been added: JMdict and JMnedict, KANJIDIC2, CC-CEDICT, Wiktionary (Kaikki), GCIDE, Webster's 1913 and WordNet (LMF). The catalog is built out of them — dictionaries like these simply do not exist in the usual formats.
• A dictionary is no longer indexed to disk — it is ready as soon as it is unpacked.
• One broken dictionary no longer hangs all the others, and a disabled one frees its memory while staying in the list.
• Articles are styled the same way in every dictionary.
• Add dictionary → Download free dictionaries opens the catalog: over 50 freely licensed dictionaries across 26 languages.

These languages are written without spaces, so "the word under the cursor" has to be worked out first. Lookupper can do that now.

• Each language downloads a language pack — a segmenter. It splits a line into real words rather than single characters. Ctrl breaks the selected word down character by character, for when you want one specific glyph.
• The word card carries a reading guide: furigana for Japanese, pinyin for Chinese.
• The catalog has dictionaries for them: JMdict, KANJIDIC2, JMnedict, Jitendex, CC-CEDICT and Wiktionary.

Article and gender were asked for most often. They are fields of their own now, not a line lost in the pile.

• Gender comes from the word, not from the form on screen: context does not always reveal it, and in French it rarely does. So gender comes from the dictionary, and the lookup prints the word the way a dictionary would: "la babiole".
• "Key forms" — what has to be memorised alongside the headword and cannot be guessed from it: a German plural, a verb's principal parts, a Slavic aspect pair, a Chinese or Japanese measure word.
• "Components" — the breakdown into characters, radicals and morphemes with their meanings. The pop-up dictionary already showed this; the card used to throw it away.
• "Explanation" — the plain-language breakdown, now kept on the card.

The Sync with Anki button sends words into a running Anki through the AnkiConnect add-on — no file export, no manual import.

• Cards arrive ready to study; there are no spare fields to strip out.
• Syncing again updates the notes it already made instead of piling up duplicates: every word travels under its own permanent id.
• Lookupper never deletes anything in Anki. A word removed from your library leaves its note tagged lookupper::removed — what happens to it is your call.
• Reverse cards can now be switched on.
• The .apkg export is still there, and a Quizlet set export joins it.

A gamepad button triggers a lookup, and words can be picked with the pad itself.

• D-pad — pick a word, stick — scroll, A — confirm, B — close, X — save the word, Y — read it aloud.
• Gamepads XInput cannot see are read too, Sony controllers included. The lookup button is bound by pressing it, exactly like a key.

Recognition, screen capture and input handling were rewritten from the ground up. The difference shows most in games that load the CPU themselves.

• New PP-OCRv6 recognition models and a reworked pipeline: word edges are snapped to the ink of the line, and paragraphs are grouped by a new algorithm.
• Screen capture is faster through DirectX Desktop Duplication. An HDR desktop is read directly.
• All global input — hotkeys, mouse buttons, gamepad — lives on one dedicated thread and restores itself if Windows drops the hook.
• During a lookup Lookupper raises its own priority so the game cannot take the whole CPU.
• The screen translator does not re-recognise a frame that has not changed — and does not spend quota on it.

"No freeze", "Freeze frame" or "Freeze" — set separately for each program.

• Freeze frame stops the picture only: the game keeps running, keeps its sound, and still hears the gamepad. Freeze stops it outright — that is the cure for games that pin the cursor to the middle of the screen or advance dialogue faster than you read.
• Program profiles add themselves after the first lookup.
• A game protected by anti-cheat cannot be frozen. Lookupper will tell you.
• Freezing a game that runs as administrator no longer means running all of Lookupper as administrator.

A usage ring appeared in the title bar, with the exact numbers in its tooltip.

• Two counters: 50 pop-up dictionary lookups and 50 screen translations a day. It used to be one opaque limit that you learned about when it ran out.
• Offline dictionaries and the offline translator are not counted — they are free forever, and the app says as much.
• The size of the free limit has not changed. What changed is that you can see it.