Feature requests

[NickF]

I am extremely grateful for Pleco and thankful to the folks who have put this together. It's obvious that Pleco is, first and foremost, a labor of love.

At the risk of sounding like an unsatisfied jerk, and without the foggiest notion regarding feasibility, I'd like to mention a couple of ideas that I'd find to be useful enhancements. These ideas are all related to the Flashcard mode:

1) The ability to set the pinyin font size and style independent from the rest of the definition. I want to be able to make the pinyin text larger without affecting the rest of the definition.

2) To be able to select additional repetitions (besides just two) and to be able to set the time for those repetitions to occur. For instance, the user could select four repetitions of an incorrect word, and then choose for those repetitions to occur at 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 90 minutes, and 180 minutes.

3) When testing by showing the definition first and then revealing the characters, besides removing instances of the character from the definition, I'd like for Pleco to also remove occurrences of the pinyin.

If there are already ways of accomplishing these things, I'd be grateful for some instruction or to be pointed in the right direction for help. And THANK YOU to everyone involved!

 

[mikelove]

1) Would this be just in the top or in example sentences too?

2) I'm not sure how well this would work within the current concept of sessions, which generally only last a few hours - this feels more like an SRS feature, something that applies to a card in between sessions too.

3) We actually do that now, at least we try to - could you give me an example of a card (including which dictionary it comes from) where this doesn't work?

 

[NickF]

1) Would this be just in the top or in example sentences too?

Maybe? I only had the pinyin line underneath the characters in the flashcards in mind. The goal would be for the tone marks to stand out better. I've experimented with different fonts, but I haven't found one yet that exaggerates the tone marks.

2) I'm not sure how well this would work within the current concept of sessions, which generally only last a few hours - this feels more like an SRS feature, something that applies to a card in between sessions too.

Then I might not be using the app correctly, and/or I don't fully understand how SRS is supposed to work . I leave Pleco open pretty much continuously, and so a "session" might be a week or so and several hundred cards. I'm currently studying one of the HSK sets, Levels 1-3, along with Extra Basic, Extra Elementary, and Extra Intermediate selected. Maybe that's too big of a chunk (2785 cards) to do SRS properly?

3) We actually do that now, at least we try to - could you give me an example of a card (including which dictionary it comes from) where this doesn't work?

IIRC, it seems to come up when a character is also a family name and the first letter of the pinyin is capitalized. I'll post a specific example when a card with this issue pops up again.

Thank you again!

 

[NickF]

I'm sorry about not getting back to this post sooner. I'm having difficulty finding decent examples of the definition including the pinyin that I mentioned previously. Here are two examples that kind of illustrate what I'm talking about.

This wouldn't be an issue if I wasn't a horrible, dirty, rotten cheater who could resist seeing the pinyin and then coming up with the character.

 

[mikelove]

1) Makes sense in that context, yes.

2) Yeah, it'd be better not to do SRS that way - Pleco doesn't re-compute which cards are due when you resume a session, so you'll basically only be reviewing cards that were due as of when the session began. (this is something we plan to fix soon though)

3) Ah, yeah, those cases are difficult because if we simply find-and-replace every instance of any Pinyin syllable that's also in the headword, we'll end up giving even more away (if for example we remove the Pinyin in a phrase that you recognize / that isn't the headword). It might be better to simply strip out all Pinyin entirely in those cases, at least unless/until we take the time to go through every entry that contains Pinyin in its definition and manually tag the parts that are mirrored from the headword.