VocabularyFox

VocabularyFox is an open-source vocabulary quiz program, written in Java.

VocabularyFox offers the following:

• Supports (but is not limited to) English and French vocabulary quizzes
• Lets you add your own vocabulary quizzes easily
• Includes a sample vocabulary quiz
• Lets you choose the language of the user interface (currently English and German).
  NOTE: If you like to contribute to adding another language, feel free to contact me at "lo (dot) wiest (at) web (dot) de".

I developed VocabularyFox on Windows 8.1 (64-bit), but it should be easy to port it to other platforms.

Enjoy — Lorenz

Table of Contents

• Quick Start
• Visual Tour
• How to Add Your Own Quizzes
• Technical Footnotes
• Build Instructions
• Porting Tips
• License

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• You have installed Java JDK (or SDK) 8 or higher on your system.

Instructions

1. Download VocabularyFox.jar to a folder.

2. Open a command prompt in that folder and enter

   java -jar VocabularyFox.jar
   

3. This runs VocabularyFox.

Visual Tour

Selecting a Quiz

Select a vocabulary quiz from the list (the sample quizzes in the list are for illustration purposes):

Selecting Quiz Options

(Optional) To select quiz options, click the gear icon . This opens the Preferences dialog. It displays the version number, lets you change the language of the user interface (currently English and German), and lets you modify quiz options:

Taking a Quiz

This is a sample of a French quiz:

Tip

To make typing easier when entering an answer, you can use a set of abbreviations (depending on the language). The screenshots below show the supported abbreviations for English and French quizzes:

(French quizzes only) To enter French text with a non-French keyboard, click button (1). This opens a list of French characters. Select one of the characters to insert it into your answer.

(French quizzes only) Buttons (2) appear with nouns whose article doesn’t indicate the gender. After typing the answer, click either the m. (masculine) or f. (feminine) button to define the gender, then continue with the next word.

Reviewing the Quiz Results

After you have entered all answers, your results are listed:

Your answers are are color-coded as follows:

• Black : Correct answer on your first try
• Orange exclamation mark: Correct answer on your second try
• Red exclamation mark: Correct answer on your third try — or no correct answer at all
• Blue : Noun of masculine gender
• Dark red : Noun of feminine gender

Saving Quiz Results

To save your results as a web page to the file system, click on the download page icon .

Repeating a Quiz

If you like to repeat a quiz, you can repeat either the entire quiz or just the words with wrong answers:

How to Add Your Own Quizzes

It is easy to add your own quizzes to VocabularyFox!

• See instructions in English.
• See instructions in German.

Technical Footnotes

• VocabularyFox looks for quizzes in the quizzes folder, located in the same folder as the VocabularyFox.jar file. If VocabularyFox doesn’t find this folder, then VocabularyFox automatically creates it, containing a sample quiz.
• VocabularyFox saves and loads application preferences from the .preferences_vocabularyfox file, which is located in the same folder as the VocabularyFox.jar file. If VocabularyFox doesn’t find this file, then VocabularyFox automatically creates it.

Build Instructions

Prerequisites

• You are running a Windows (64-bit) system.
• You have installed Java SDK 8 (64-bit) or higher on your system (I used Java SDK 8 (64-bit)).
• You have installed an Eclipse IDE on your system (I used Eclipse 4.5.0 "Mars" (64-bit)).

Instructions

1. Download this project’s ZIP file from GitHub.
2. Unzip it to a temporary folder.
3. To work with the VocabularyFox source code in your Eclipse IDE, import the VocabularyFox project from the temporary folder into your Eclipse IDE as an import source General > Existing Projects into Workspace.
4. In the Project Explorer view, right-click VocabularyFox and select Run As > Java Application.
5. The VocabularyFox application starts.

Porting Tips

To port VocabularyFox to another platform, apply the following changes:

1. Adjust the font name assigned to variable Resources.FONT_NAME (currently "Calibri") to a font available on your platform.
2. Replace the SWT library org.eclipse.swt.win32.win32.x86_64_XXX.jar with the SWT library specific to your platform. (The library name follows the pattern org.eclipse.swt.<platform>_<version>.v<timestamp>.jar.)

License

This project is available under the MIT license.