Dictionary.app is broken. What’s likely occurred is that you signed into Wikipedia in Safari, are using their Beta for usability, and now scrolling or resizing your Dictionary.app window doesn’t show any text that wasn’t rendered to the display upon first opening that Wikipedia article in Dictionary. To test that your conditions are similar, hover over some links to other articles in a Wikipedia article within Dictionary, and you’ll notice a yellow info popup. Cool feature, but Apple hasn’t updated their software to understand the new beta pages. So now the OSX dictionary content looks like this:

… even when you resize the window like this:

Scrolling, keyboard arrow keys etc. will not work.

It was annoying trying to figure out what was happening here. Naturally, the lonely adolescent Mac users on Apple’s support forums (Apple’s idea of “their support”) chiming in with random busywork advise to feign knowledgeability and seem important never helps. Those types of search results were common for all queries imaginable.

Here’s how to fix it:

1. Go to Wikipedia.org in Safari make sure you’re signed out of your account by clicking here.

2. Quit and re-open Dictionary.app and you are usually good to go.

   
   

3. If your results are still broken, deleting ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Dictionary/Cache.db may be helpful.

If you’re curious what you’re deleting, and you should be, /Library/Caches//Cache.db are cached server responses. For the completely green, the tilde “~” character represents your user or home directory. So if your usershortname is “smartass” then you’ll delete /Users/smartass/Library/Caches/com.apple.Dictionary/Cache.db. You can open Terminal.app (Spotlight is your friend) and type / paste: rm -r ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.Dictionary then hitting enter.

Comment and rate this post below, to let me know how it went for you. (o:

To prevent this, you can:

a.) Be awesome, and less lazy than me. Fix /Applications/Dictionary.app/Contents/Resources/WikipediaSupport.js file and ping back here to reciprocate with some knowledge love!

b.) Exit the Wikipedia beta for usability in Safari. Frankly, this option sucks since parts of that are useful and I fear some analyticstard at the foundation is looking at those figures thinking “people exiting the program =usability is poor, don’t commit these changes” vs “Apple is a cathedral, not a bazaar and moves at a glacial pace through technology.” Within the dictionary, I found the beta features very useful.

c.) Cross fingers. Well, this happened before – many times. Never cared to track down causation, but before the explicit beta for Wikipedia started here I’d had issues in the past. FYI – I learned many a moon ago whilst making customizations to the Dictionary, that its Wikipedia access is just a big ugly JS/CSS hack. Presumably some changes were made to Wikipedia that broke things temporarily, but other factors could come into play. Am I the only one that finds this annoying for a commercial product?

For anyone trying to find this (or to help me find this again some day), searches I used in vein to see if others had a solution to this were dictionary.app cache snow leopard cut off scroll bug issues problem wikipedia dictionary scrollbars os x osx.

via smartassism.com