Pleco for Android 3.1.7/8

Up on GPlay shortly, on website now. (http://pleco.com/getandroid) EDIT: 3.1.8 out with a few more bug fixes. (actually old bugs, not newly-introduced-in-3.1.7 ones)

Full change log in the instruction manual; aside from bug fixes, we finally gave into (still-growing) pressure and added an option (off by default, of course) for the hardware menu button to toggle the navigation drawer open / closed.

The fact that Samsung just had a terrible quarter and LG had a fantastic one has me optimistic that the pendulum is finally swinging away from terrible nonstandard UI skins / buttons and towards nice clean stock versions of Android, so with any luck in a year or two there'll be hardly anybody left who still has a hardware menu button, but those of you who still have them now have been vocal enough that we felt we could no longer justify saying no.

Male TTS add-on should launch as soon as Apple approves the corresponding update that adds it on iOS.

Unsafe mode is working about 5-6 times faster than normal mode. Is there a risk of corrupting the flashcard database when importing flashcards into a user dictionary?

Hey there. First of all I want to say that I really appreciate all the work you guys put into this application, there have been a ton of improvements and new functions over the years, many of which are very useful. Now it feels, though, as if something has been lost along the way. It just isn't as intuitive as it was. For the most part, I find group dictionaries (especially the Full Text groups) somewhat irritating and prefer to toggle manually through the dictionaries. I know I can turn off the group dictionaries, but it took me a while until I remembered I had not only to check "Use this dictionary" box in every dict I wanted to use, but I also had to uncheck "Skip over on button tap". Isn't this redundant? What happens if I don't uncheck "Skip over on button tap", where will this dictionary be used? I had some other problems as well while tweaking around:

1. When I am not using groups and looking at a result from a single dictionary, say Guifan, and then want to look at the examples, I get examples from all the dictionaries, not only Guifan. One example: I look for "汽车" and open the Guifan dictionary. Now I switch to the examples and the first one I get is from ABC: "汽车越来越多,从而空气也越来越坏." Only via full text search did I find out that this was an example for "从而" and not "汽车". -edit- Same thing applies to using the group "All Chinese Dicts", here I also get full text results from every entry.

2.When I create a custom dictionary group while disabling "All Chinese Dicts" it only shows results from the first dictionary in that group. When I reactivate "All Chinese Dicts", I get results from all the dictionaries in my custom group.

3. When I check the "Full text search only" box in the full text dictionary groups and then look for "#汽车" or "#car" I don't get any results from those groups, only when I uncheck the box those groups become visible. This even applies to "All Chinese/English Dicts". Took me a while to figure this out, not seeing any CC/EE-icons while doing full text searches drove me nuts.

@HW60 - some risk, yes; I'd recommend backing up your flashcard database before you try it.

@burdenofhope - thanks for the thoughtful feedback.

As far as dictionary groups in general, honestly it's just not realistic for us to design our app to handle both modes equally well - we can either design around more than one dictionary or design around a single dictionary at a time, and for most users we think dictionary groups are a better bet; it's extremely frustrating to have to cycle through dictionaries to find every definition for a word, or every possible match for a particular Pinyin string. So for people who aren't already accustomed to the single dictionary method we actually think the group focus is considerably more intuitive.

So our general goal with single dictionary support has been to try to make sure that people who were already accustomed to it can keep using it in the way that they were accustomed to, but we're not really able to invest the time in making sure that every new feature we add (like the SENTS tab) works equally well with single-dictionary searches as with dictionary groups.

"Use this dictionary" actually doesn't relate to button switching, if it's disabled then a dictionary will be totally inactive - even in dictionary groups. This is why every dictionary has that option on by default along with "skip over on button tap."

Regarding 1), that's pretty much explained by my earlier paragraph - SENTS wasn't something that we offered at all back before we started doing dictionary groups, so we don't feel obligated to make it work well for single dictionaries unless a lot of people ask for it, which hasn't happened so far.

2) I'm not seeing here - which type of search are you doing in this group, and which dictionaries does it include? Are you sure that the other dictionaries in the group actually have results for your word?

3) "All Chinese Dicts" and "All English Dicts" shouldn't have a "full-text search only" box, so that's a bug - we'll fix that in the next update, thanks. "Full text search only" should be checked by default for several groups - which specific groups did you enable it for besides those All ones?

Thank you for your reply.

1. I don't know if this is by design or not, but I'll try to explain my confusion as this also applies to group dictionary views. I am looking for the word 汽车 and select the first entry in the list:



Now I switch to the SENTS tab to get examples for this entry. But instead of showing me the examples for only this entry, I get full text examples from ALL entries. As I mentioned earlier, the first one is an example for "从而":



Is there a possibility to incorporate the option to see the entry an example belongs to? For example clicking on an example takes you to the entry or at least shows you what exactly it is you are looking at in a bubble box.


2. I created a dictionary group called test with 5 different dictionaries. Now I uncheck "Use in dictionary" in "All Chinese Dicts". This is what my results look like:



Once I re-check the box in "All Chinese Dicts" my results look like this:




3. First of all I have to say when once I check the "Full text search only" box an any Full Text search dictionary group I cannot use that group no matter what I look for (with or without a hashtag). It just is not included in any cycle. Now I have to differentiate between the Chinese and English full text search groups:

a) After unchecking the "Full text search only" box in the Chinese full text search groups I can use them like any other group, looking for "汽车" it will also cycle through those groups. When I use a hashtag, those full text groups disappear, see the attached images:



English "Full text ENG/CHN dicts" seem to be working fine once I uncheck "Full text search only".


4. Regarding 3., why have4 full text groups instead of 2? Why differentiate between a full text search for a Chinese and an English word? Instead of 6 different icons ("C", inverted "C", "CC", "E", inverted "E", "EE") we could have only four: "C" for "All Chinese Dicts", "E" for "All English Dicts", plus the inverted letters for full text searches no matter the input language.

With 1), the sentences from entries for this specific word should already be included in DICT - the whole idea of SENTS is to give you sentences that you *wouldn't* be able to get from the regular dictionary entries for this word, since very often other unrelated sentences in the dictionary will demonstrate the use of a word too.

I'm not quite sure what the point would be of showing you which entry a sentence originally comes from - are you trying to learn about that word too or are you simply trying to filter out which sentences are from the entry for this word and which ones aren't?

2) Which dictionaries are in this 'test' group? And its dictionary type is "Chinese-English Dicts," right? (not full text?)

3) Which other groups are enabled / disabled / set to full-text only when you're doing this? Not seeing the problem on a device here.

4) People might want to configure them differently; the default setting has Chinese full-text searches disabled and English ones enabled, e.g.

Also, which of the "Integrate C-E full text" and "Integrate E-C full text" options are enabled in Settings / Search Engine?

2) I think we've found an explanation for now - rare bug; we'll fix it in 3.1.8, thanks for bringing it to our attention.

As for 3), it looks like you're using a full-width version of # instead of a half-width one - the system currently only works with half-width, though that should be fixed in 3.1.something too.

1. Thank you for the explanation, didn't know that. The reason I would like to see where a specific example is from is because I like to follow references. Once I see an interesting example I also want to have the possibility to learn more about the entry that example came from. With the old dictionary I sometimes spent ages just browsing the dictionary.

2. Glad I could help.

3. You are spot-on. Once you mentioned the weird look I checked and found out that 百度输入法 uses a wider hashtag.

4. I see your point, I still find a bit confusing, though. I'd prefer just 2 full text search groups by default - one for all Chinese and one for all English dictionaries - and if people want to customize give them the option to create own groups. On a similar note: how do I create a new full text dictionary group for English dictionaries?

5. Weird error I just encountered: I create two new groups, Full-text Search (English Dicts) and Full-text Search (Chinese Dicts). When I delete the first group I created, the second one is deleted automatically as well, Pleco crashes and when I reopen it both groups reappear. It is reproducable, plus sometimes this strange group appears in the English tab:

On 1), that makes sense - it's enough of a UI change that I think it'll have to wait for 3.2 but it does seem like a useful thing to add.

For 4), you can create that if you go into the "English" section of Manage Groups.

Seeing 5) here too - actually we also uncovered a potential crashing bug in # Chinese searches in the midst of testing some of this stuff, so we should have that 3.1.8 out in a day or two.

Good morning

Since the sentences topic is on right now, there came 2 questions to my mind:

1. Are there any news on implementing a function to save example sentences as a flashcard yet? That would be really great.
2. Will there be another german dictionary with examples? It's basically allright with the english ones but since chinese is hard enough to learn, it makes me a little dizzy to learn with three languages at a time.
3. Really great would be a german version of the Tuttle learners dict but I doubt there is anything like that.

1) Coming probably in the first of our series of big flashcard updates - that got pushed back a bit because it's late enough now that we pretty much have to focus version 3.2 on iOS 8 / Android L, but once we get that out the door we'll finally be able to start adding all of this long-awaited flashcard stuff.

2) Yes, one already licensed and two others we're in some stage of discussion about. Germany is well in the lead sales-wise among non-English-speaking Pleco countries, and while some of its lead over other countries may come from the fact that German speakers generally seem to be more comfortable working in English than French / Spanish / etc speakers are, we nevertheless consider German to be our top foreign language priority at the moment.

3) Not aware of any title quite like that, but it would be a nice idea. Heck, it's a pretty small dictionary, if things go well with our initial German launches then perhaps we could talk to Tuttle about commissioning a translation

That all sounds really great! With a more comprehensive German-Chinese dict and a german version of tuttle I will be so happiest chinese learning guy in germany

I'm really looking forward to the flashcard upgrades.

Another thing:
I was just remembered of this issue as I installed a custom font. Maybe be this is just the case for the HanDe Dict, not sure about that. If there is an example in the definition of a word, there seems to be a lot of spaces or sth. like that inside this example. The build in font shows them as spaces inside of pleco. If I use a custom font or I copy it to any other application or export it as a text file, I get those diamond framed question marks.

For example:


In the standard-font, every of the "?" is a space, you can test that if you use the |-> Button.
As I said, this seems only to be the case for HanDeDict. I browsed through a lot of entries with other dictionarys and never found this issue. Maybe there is sth. going wrong with the conversation.
There are never characters missing btw. it's just the space between 2 characters that is sometimes filled with spaces or "?".

The exaplmes in HanDeDict seem to be a little odd in total, aside from this issue, the example in the screenshots is missing some punctuation and it shows the first example with chinese, pinyin and definition and the folowing examples are just the definition with the chinese missing it seems.
If you seperate it it looks like this:

再译一次 zai4shi4yi1ci4 noch einmal versuchen (Here is also a mistake in the pinyin because it doesn't match with the characters and should be zai4yi4yi1ci4)
Kleiner gibt es das nicht.
Wenn du die Hausaufgaben gemacht hast, dann kannst du ausgehen.
Die Jugend kehrt nicht wieder.

So the last three sentences have no chinese and no pinyin.

Is Pleco supposed to work properly in multi-window mode? The pop-up bubble seems to have issues when Pleco is in the bottom half of the screen.

@NomekSan - sounds like HDD was using an odd, non-standard space character; I'd suggest that you try a different font, though we'll make a note to see if we can fix those non-standard spaces when we update HDD again.

@jmu3 - it is, but we haven't bothered to optimize any screens except the main dictionary search one around it so far - that will do a few cool tricks like updating the search results as soon as you copy text to the clipboard from the other tab (if you've set Pleco to search for the clipboard on startup), but we didn't really expect a lot of people to be multi-windowing with the reader. We can look at improving this in a future release, though.

This seems like a new bug:

All cards I delete or I put manually in the "uncategorized" section are disappearing. They are accessible through the search function and when I go to the card info to "categories" there are no categories assigned and I can't assign them to "uncategorized".
I deleted some groups lately and I wandered where the cards went since they should go to uncategorized. I found them now with the search function. Some of them I want to delete completely but I can't unless I make a search for all cards and go through the list manually.

This sounds like you have a couple of 'phantom categories' - the consequences of a bug in the importer from a few versions ago. If you email me (mikelove@pleco.com) a backup your flashcard database we can easily remove them so that the cards will correctly show up as 'uncategorized.'

Hi,
first: thanks for your help. It all works fine now.

A little idea for a neat text-reader feature came to my mind:

There is an option to alternate the gender of the audio recordings. Since there is a male TTS voice now (I don't know if the alternating feature in general is enabled for TTS if both are installed) there could be an option to realize realistic dialogues in the reader. You could write a dialogue into a text file and set a marker in a seperate line everytime the voice should change to either male or female, sth. like this:

#M (for male)
你好！
#F（for female)
你好！
#M
你好吗？
#F
我很好，谢谢！
你呢？
#M
我也很好。
#F
天气好吗？
#M
它不很好。
#F
真可惜。

and so on...
Maybe there could be an option where you can set either to change every line and define the start voice or to use markers if you have dialoges where one person speaks over several lines. Since there are only two voices it would even be enough to define only one marker and a start-gender. The marker could also be just a blank line.

As I said. just a little idea to keep your creativity flowing but first, get those german dictionarys ready

We put that on our feature list years ago before we even had multiple voices, actually - would indeed be fun to implement at some point.

Found a bug with the live OCR. The screen will still rotate Even though its been set to portrait.