Writing Chinese Documents in Pleco Android

I'm just about to upgrade my phone, and I've been considering the Galaxy Note, since I think it would be great for writing chinese characters. However, unlike the iOS versions, the Android version does not seem to allow editing and writing in the reader.
I LOVE the iOS full screen writing for composing in Pleco. Will this feature ever be added to Android? Or, any text editing for that matter?

Best,
Gary=-,

garysaville said:

I'm just about to upgrade my phone, and I've been considering the Galaxy Note, since I think it would be great for writing chinese characters. However, unlike the iOS versions, the Android version does not seem to allow editing and writing in the reader.
I LOVE the iOS full screen writing for composing in Pleco. Will this feature ever be added to Android? Or, any text editing for that matter?

Click to expand...

It's not part of our current plans; Android supports third-party input methods and there are already several of those that offer fullscreen handwriting (just search Android Market for them), and on Android it's very easy for one app to save a file which another app can read from the same directory, so the arguments on iOS for having our own text editor don't really apply on Android. We'd only consider it if we came up with some sort of new or novel text input method that nobody else had, and in that case we'd probably distribute it as an Android input method ourselves rather than building it into Pleco.

I've searched the market for IMEs. However, none come close to the quality of Pleco's full screen input. gpen is the best I've seen so far, but it does not give suggestions as you type, and the maximum pause time is 1.5 seconds, then the screen clears and you are forced to choose a candidate.
Was your IME licensed? Why iPhone and not Android? It seems the stock android IME (or any other 3rd party options) are just as bad, if not worse, than the iPhones.

Does anyone have any suggestions for a good handwriting IME that has continuous prediction and does not reset after a few seconds?

Thanks
Gary

garysaville said:

I've searched the market for IMEs. However, none come close to the quality of Pleco's full screen input. gpen is the best I've seen so far, but it does not give suggestions as you type, and the maximum pause time is 1.5 seconds, then the screen clears and you are forced to choose a candidate.

Click to expand...

Have you tried Baidu's yet? That's a pretty good free fullscreen one.

garysaville said:

Was your IME licensed? Why iPhone and not Android? It seems the stock android IME (or any other 3rd party options) are just as bad, if not worse, than the iPhones.

Click to expand...

Yes, same exact engine as on iPhone. The manufacturer of that already offers their own IME with it for 35 RMB, which also works fullscreen.

Unlike the iPhone, neither Baidu and Hanwang recognize characters as they are being written. Once you pause for the set duration, they simultaneously clear the palate and then offer candidates. Since I have to pause and think at times before completing a character, this gets awfully annoying.

Tough call. My phone contract is up and the Galaxy Note is a great device, but this is a huge lost feature. I might just wait it out for the iPhone 5.

If anyone knows of an input editor that has the above features. I'd love to hear about it.

Thanks again,
Gary

garysaville said:

Unlike the iPhone, neither Baidu and Hanwang recognize characters as they are being written. Once you pause for the set duration, they simultaneously clear the palate and then offer candidates. Since I have to pause and think at times before completing a character, this gets awfully annoying.

Tough call. My phone contract is up and the Galaxy Note is a great device, but this is a huge lost feature. I might just wait it out for the iPhone 5.

Click to expand...

Fair enough. Sorry about that - unfortunately those other IMEs do seem to satisfy enough other people so as to make the business case for a Pleco document editing feature difficult, though perhaps there's an interesting market opportunity for someone in making an IME specifically for people learning Chinese. (if we weren't so busy we could consider it ourselves, but we're at least a year away from having any free time in our programming schedule)

Well, I broke down and bought the Galaxy Note anyway. HangWang's editor allows up to 1 second, and the grid is nice to write on. Although I miss the candidates to help with the stroke order, the reset time does force me to think through how I'll write the character before I start, and then do it quickly.
Would love to see a more "learner centred" input in the future; but, overall, the experience on the Galaxy Note is fantastic.

mikelove said:

on Android it's very easy for one app to save a file which another app can read from the same directory, so the arguments on iOS for having our own text editor don't really apply on Android

Click to expand...

I understand.

On Android in Pleco's reader I use: 1. night mode, 2. STKaiti.ttf, 3. font sizes of 40 to 60.
Could someone please recommend a simple text editor (not word processor) for Android that will let me do those three things?

I don't want to change the *system* font, and permissions requirements of custom font installer apps are excessive; I would like the text editor to let me choose a font that I upload (just as Pleco does).

Thanks in advance!

I use Samsung's built in keyboard (Tablet SM-T815). The size for the character input is the same size as the pinyin input (normal keyboard, can be adjusted). The input speed seems to have no setting, but follows the speed of the first strokes, so if you start writing slowly you can continue slowly, but cannot make a pause. Therefore I prefer Pleco's handwriting, but that does not work everywhere in Pleco.

Thanks, but I'm looking for a text editor.
Oh, I see you're replying to earlier posts.
I'm still looking for a text editor.

This issue is not very important for at least two reasons: 1. I do most writing on a desktop anyway and just want to edit a little on mobile devices (mostly, I just want to make corrections to whatever I'm reading in the reader and save them), and 2. we should probably practice some tolerance for different fonts anyway, and I already have a kai-style font almost everywhere else.

But, I'll continue a little...
I just noticed that on Pleco iOS - where I enjoy the add-on kaiti font, thank you - when I open the editor (via the pencil tool in the reader) the font used there is a system font, not that kaiti, and I'm sure there's some technical reason for that. It's nice to have an editor inside Pleco regardless. But it's a little odd that there's no special demand for kaiti, as kaiti looks like *the* Chinese characters that so many people find especially beautiful, right?

Thank goodness I can use a kaiti in the reader and everywhere else in Pleco on both Android and iOS, so it's no serious problem.

That's basically because Apple's built-in text editor is horribly buggy with large documents - even with the system font it doesn't work very well and when we tried it with KaiTi it was a complete disaster.

We've actually been working to add text editing support to our own text field control on iOS, though, hoping that'll debut in one of our next few updates - with that the transition between reading and editing should be totally seamless, you'll be in the exact same document but now you'll have a cursor. We've also had very good success with performance optimization and at least on a reasonably modern iPhone you can edit even a 10 MB document with no discernible lag or delay. (even supports rich text, in fact, though we don't yet have a good standard format to store that in)

On Android our custom text field is much more primitive - we only use it for large text files, we use a different method to quickly render rich text in dictionary entries - so it would be considerably harder to add editing support to that.

Very interesting. I'm glad it isn't a pressing problem for me, but I'll be waiting.

There's also the question of privacy. Many of the 'free' input methods need an indefensible list of permissions. Google Pinyin needs 14 permissions; Baidu 入法 a staggering 31. By contrast, Hanvon Calla Handwriting IME needs only one (1).