Dear Bart,
Thanks for your reply. I should have linked to the modern fork of GoldenDict that is under active development,
https://xiaoyifang.github.io/goldendict-ng/dictformats/ There is a large dictionary popular in my language community that is designed to be used with this software, so that's just what I ended up using. And the StarDict format it supports is straightforward enough that I have been able to hack together some other data sources into working dictionaries for my work.
The great advantage to the GoldenDict software is that you can install multiple dictionaries and search them all in one go. You can even add online dictionaries. My short term goal (which I should have stated more directly) is to be able to search in a version of the dictionary I am creating while at the same time searching in all the other dictionaries I use. I guess I could use the Webonary online version of my project. But I'd rather have an offline version.
Are you familiar with other Windows apps that work like this and also support a format that can read something exported from FLEx?
I haven't looked into DAB yet, but I need something that works on desktop, and that seems to be android. I'm guessing that most of the folks who use Flex probably just stick with the SIL solutions, but there seems to be a world of other dictionary formats out there.
There is
pyglossary, but it doesn't seem to work with SFM or LIFT. I guess my next step would be to reach out to that community.
Now that I think about it… For my purposes if I could just get a json that had the headwords as keys and the definitions as the values, then I could convert it. Maybe the xhtml file is what I need to look at using. Hmm.
Thanks!