How can I read a PDF document and use a dictionary at the same time?

Could anybody point we to a way how could I read a PDF from Chrome and use a dictionary (e.g. English dictionary extensions from Google)?

I wish to double click a word and choose "translate" (or something similar). Right now, I have to copy every unknown word to clipboard which is not what I want.

Solution 1:

There are several other extensions in the Chrome Web Store which do translation and definitions. The mechanism the extension uses to show translations determines whether it will work in Chrome's PDF viewer. Extensions which add an option to the right-click menu will work in the Chrome PDF viewer, while the extension you mentioned just depends on clicking on the word, which does not work. A couple that I tried (just from a quick search):

• Right Click and Translate: free, 4.5 stars, 9.3k users
• Reference.com dictionary lookup: free, 5 stars, 800 users

Both of these worked fine in the built-in PDF viewer, as shown above. If your PDFs are opening in an Acrobat plugin, you'll want to disable that so that you can use the built-in one. You can do this by going to chrome://plugins and clicking Disable next to Adobe Acrobat. Make sure that Chrome PDF Viewer is enabled.

Solution 2:

You could also try converting the PDF to HTML then just open it with chrome. It may not work with file:// protocol, so you might have to put it on a local server (xampp on windows) and access it like any website (eg. localhost/my_pdfs/book13.pdf). There are plenty of online converters. I've tried this one http://www.idrsolutions.com/online-pdf-to-html5-converter, it separates each page into a separate html file which is named by the page name (eg. page 66 is 066.html) and it has a next previous navigation menu on the bottom. But you could always google around and try others and see what kind of conversion output you like.

Solution 3:

You can replicate OS X's system wide dictionary/wikipedia lookup with a nifty little program called GoldenDict. It's cross-platform and compatible with a variety of different dictonary formats, including openbabel and stardict. It can also be asily configured to lookup phrases online, e.g. on wikipedia/wiktionary. That's just the tip of the iceberg, though. It's completely customizable and has tons of useful features - much more so than OS X's dictionary.