Get flashcards directly from a document?

[Seph]

I just downloaded the document viewer (which is fantastic by the way!) and am considering downloading the flashcard app, as I am currently using Flashonary for flashcards, and constantly switching between the two every time I find a new word is slightly irritating. My question then, is whether or not it is possible to add a selected word from a document, directly into my flashcards, without having to navigate back and forth between the document and the dictionary sections of Pleco?

In a similar vein, I find manually typing in example sentences to establish context for more difficult words to be time-consuming. Is it possible for example sentences to automatically be added to the flashcard, when I add the word? Or, even better, is it possible to automatically add the sentence surrounding the selected word (in a document) as an example sentence to a flashcard?

Sorry if these questions have been addressed elsewhere!

 

[mikelove]

I just downloaded the document viewer (which is fantastic by the way!) and am considering downloading the flashcard app, as I am currently using Flashonary for flashcards, and constantly switching between the two every time I find a new word is slightly irritating. My question then, is whether or not it is possible to add a selected word from a document, directly into my flashcards, without having to navigate back and forth between the document and the dictionary sections of Pleco?

Yes - couldn't be easier, tap on a word to select it, then tap on the + button (only visible once you've bought the flashcard add-on) to add it to flashcards.

In a similar vein, I find manually typing in example sentences to establish context for more difficult words to be time-consuming. Is it possible for example sentences to automatically be added to the flashcard, when I add the word? Or, even better, is it possible to automatically add the sentence surrounding the selected word (in a document) as an example sentence to a flashcard?

Not yet, but we've had a few other requests for something like this and we're looking into how we might support it in a future release.

 

[Seph]

Awesome! Thanks for the quick reply

 

[radioman]

Yeah, I mentioned something like this a while back. I'm looking for this...highlight English / Hanzi / Pinyin all in a single highlight and be able to have Pleco sort it out into a flashcard.

In a similar vein, I find manually typing in example sentences to establish context for more difficult words to be time-consuming. Is it possible for example sentences to automatically be added to the flashcard, when I add the word? Or, even better, is it possible to automatically add the sentence surrounding the selected word (in a document) as an example sentence to a flashcard?

 

[radioman]

Google Spreadsheets Syncing

I am wondering what it would take to allow Pleco to import and export flashcards to Google Spreadsheets. From collaboration, to translation, to backup, etc., the list of benefits goes on and on. This method is employed with other study programs I use and it works very, very well.

 

[mikelove]

Yeah, I mentioned something like this a while back. I'm looking for this...highlight English / Hanzi / Pinyin all in a single highlight and be able to have Pleco sort it out into a flashcard.

That one's tough given the less-than-100% reliability of detecting Pinyin versus English. And I'm not entirely seeing the use case - are there a lot of texts floating around that happen to have those three items in random order?

I am wondering what it would take to allow Pleco to import and export flashcards to Google Spreadsheets. From collaboration, to translation, to backup, etc., the list of benefits goes on and on. This method is employed with other study programs I use and it works very, very well.

Doable, but the priority right now is iCloud - there's a ton of interest in iPhone/iPad flashcard sync and it lends itself well to future desktop app possibilities too.

 

[radioman]

The use case is being able to take a sample sentence from a definition that Pleco is displaying, and move it into a flashcard. I wasn't thinking of this as an OCR thing, so I am thinking the Pinyin detection could be made to be reasonably accurate (I think...).

iCloud - yeah that makes sense. I'd like that support for sure.

 

[mikelove]

The use case is being able to take a sample sentence from a definition that Pleco is displaying, and move it into a flashcard. I wasn't thinking of this as an OCR thing, so I am thinking the Pinyin detection could be made to be reasonably accurate (I think...).

Well for that we're better off just detecting it from the surrounding tags in the entry - already 90% of the way there on that, just need to make a few minor coding changes.

 

[radioman]

Well, certainly would encourage this one. Many times I see a definition with a great sample sentence, I want to get it into a flashcard. Was doing it tonight, but the process is annoying and manual. This would really be helpful. Anyway, hope you get time for that last 10%.

The use case is being able to take a sample sentence from a definition that Pleco is displaying, and move it into a flashcard. I wasn't thinking of this as an OCR thing, so I am thinking the Pinyin detection could be made to be reasonably accurate (I think...).

Well for that we're better off just detecting it from the surrounding tags in the entry - already 90% of the way there on that, just need to make a few minor coding changes.

 

[radioman]

Custom Flashcard Maker Card button.
It would seem to me that there should just be a constant and ever-present "Write to flashcard" option.
- It would be activated in the same way as you currently employ copy/search/translate to highlghted strings. The menu would simply be extended to copy/search/translate/create card.
- This would be strictly a custom card function.
- If only Chinese is highlighted, then you would bring up the card template with just the Chinese entered. Same goes for English (or whatever language).
- You would auto-detect if there was English, Chinese, or Pinyin, and sort it out in the destination card accordingly.

Rapid OCR Sentence and Phrase Input
Currently if there is a list of sentences, it would be good to have the automatic list capture function be able to be extended to sentences.
- Everything highlighted in the OCR selector that is recognized would be written to the Hanzi area of a new card. So if you had a list of sentences, it would be easy to move through the list and automatically write the cards. The English Definitions could be added later.
- Advanced: auto-break the sentences after a sentence designator, question mark, etc.

 

[mikelove]

Custom Flashcard Maker Card button.
It would seem to me that there should just be a constant and ever-present "Write to flashcard" option.
- It would be activated in the same way as you currently employ copy/search/translate to highlghted strings. The menu would simply be extended to copy/search/translate/create card.
- This would be strictly a custom card function.
- If only Chinese is highlighted, then you would bring up the card template with just the Chinese entered. Same goes for English (or whatever language).
- You would auto-detect if there was English, Chinese, or Pinyin, and sort it out in the destination card accordingly.

Rapid OCR Sentence and Phrase Input
Currently if there is a list of sentences, it would be good to have the automatic list capture function be able to be extended to sentences.
- Everything highlighted in the OCR selector that is recognized would be written to the Hanzi area of a new card. So if you had a list of sentences, it would be easy to move through the list and automatically write the cards. The English Definitions could be added later.
- Advanced: auto-break the sentences after a sentence designator, question mark, etc.

Already supported in the document reader and OCR through an option we sneakily added over the summer called "Unknown flashcard handling" - Settings / Reader / Popup Reader / Unknown flashcard for the former and Settings / OCR / Flashcards / Unknown flashcard for the latter. If you set it to "Custom Card," whenever you highlight a piece of text in the document reader that has no exact dictionary match (even if it's sentence-length), or OCR-lookup a block of text that has no exact dictionary match, tapping on the + button will pop up a custom card screen with the headword prepopulated with that text. No auto-detect of Pinyin etc yet, though, all it does is capture the characters.

 

[radioman]

I've said it before... I love asking for things that are already supported! Great!

 

[llammamama]

I'd just like to add my voice to the others pushing for better support of example sentence-based flashcards.

I've been waiting a few years now for this kind of functionality, but I suppose I can't complain too much thanks to all of the little workarounds you've implemented at my request ^_^

Already supported in the document reader and OCR through an option we sneakily added over the summer called "Unknown flashcard handling" - Settings / Reader / Popup Reader / Unknown flashcard for the former and Settings / OCR / Flashcards / Unknown flashcard for the latter. If you set it to "Custom Card," whenever you highlight a piece of text in the document reader that has no exact dictionary match (even if it's sentence-length), or OCR-lookup a block of text that has no exact dictionary match, tapping on the + button will pop up a custom card screen with the headword prepopulated with that text. No auto-detect of Pinyin etc yet, though, all it does is capture the characters.

Oh man, this is awesome! I wish I'd known about this new feature sooner. Good stuff.

 

[mikelove]

I'd just like to add my voice to the others pushing for better support of example sentence-based flashcards.

I've been waiting a few years now for this kind of functionality, but I suppose I can't complain too much thanks to all of the little workarounds you've implemented at my request ^_^

Oh yeah, those are way overdue... this is why I hate new platforms, in the last 3 years I'd say about 2/3 of our programming time has gone to porting and only 1/3 to actually adding new features. Then again, since virtually none of you are using Windows Mobile or Palm OS devices anymore I suppose a usable-albeit-slowly-updated product is better than no product at all.

Anyway, we actually are getting ready to make one major step in that direction with the Chinese text-to-speech engine we recently licensed; that'll take care of one of people's biggest gripes with sentence flashcards at the moment, which is that the audio comes out so slowly that it's next to useless. After that I think the biggest issues are probably card-creation-related - the OCR / reader custom setting was a step in the right direction, but we need to come up with some sort of automated system to do simplified->traditional and character->pinyin conversions and prepopulate cards - it'll be quite inaccurate for some characters, but we can probably work around the ambiguous cases with a friendly popup menu.

 

[llammamama]

Honestly the best value for the effort (so far as I'm concerned) would be focusing on a simple way to make flashcards out of the example sentences from the Chinese/English dictionaries which already have trad/simplified/pinyin/definition right there.

All the rest would be gravy, but delicious gravy none the less.

 

[mikelove]

Honestly the best value for the effort (so far as I'm concerned) would be focusing on a simple way to make flashcards out of the example sentences from the Chinese/English dictionaries which already have trad/simplified/pinyin/definition right there.

All the rest would be gravy, but delicious gravy none the less.

The issue with that is that a number of our dictionaries still aren't very well tagged for example sentences - we're working to improve this, but as things stand now the only dictionaries in which we could extract examples totally reliably are ABC and PLC. I suppose if we just get Tuttle and NWP added then we'll have all of the dictionaries with characters+pinyin+English examples covered, but extending this to 21cn would be trickier.

 

[yoose]

Already supported in the document reader and OCR through an option we sneakily added over the summer called "Unknown flashcard handling" - Settings / Reader / Popup Reader / Unknown flashcard for the former and Settings / OCR / Flashcards / Unknown flashcard for the latter. If you set it to "Custom Card," whenever you highlight a piece of text in the document reader that has no exact dictionary match (even if it's sentence-length), or OCR-lookup a block of text that has no exact dictionary match, tapping on the + button will pop up a custom card screen with the headword prepopulated with that text. No auto-detect of Pinyin etc yet, though, all it does is capture the characters.

How does this work for the document reader? I can get it to work with the OCR, but in the document reader when I try to highlight characters that are not recognized I get a popup that either lets me copy or search if its search then it brings me to the dictionary. The pop up reader only shows up when it recognizes the text. I tried in the Document File Reader as well and the Pasteboard Reader.

 

[mikelove]

[How does this work for the document reader? I can get it to work with the OCR, but in the document reader when I try to highlight characters that are not recognized I get a popup that either lets me copy or search if its search then it brings me to the dictionary. The pop up reader only shows up when it recognizes the text. I tried in the Document File Reader as well and the Pasteboard Reader.

The popup reader should show all the time - just tap on a word instead of tap-hold highlighting it. It won't select the whole word if it's not in the dictionary, but you can then tap on |-> to expand it to cover the term you want to add.

 

[yoose]

[How does this work for the document reader? I can get it to work with the OCR, but in the document reader when I try to highlight characters that are not recognized I get a popup that either lets me copy or search if its search then it brings me to the dictionary. The pop up reader only shows up when it recognizes the text. I tried in the Document File Reader as well and the Pasteboard Reader.

The popup reader should show all the time - just tap on a word instead of tap-hold highlighting it. It won't select the whole word if it's not in the dictionary, but you can then tap on |-> to expand it to cover the term you want to add.

ohhhh, boy do i feel silly. those arrows dont seem to go backwards though, not sure if its meant to be that way. if there is only one character selected and i press the <-| it will move the selection to the previous character but not keep the current one selected.

 

[mikelove]

ohhhh, boy do i feel silly. those arrows dont seem to go backwards though, not sure if its meant to be that way. if there is only one character selected and i press the <-| it will move the selection to the previous character but not keep the current one selected.

That actually works that way in the name of consistency - those arrows move the end of the selection, not the beginning. It would be very confusing otherwise; if tapping that arrow with the selection 1 wide extended it backwards, what would happen the next time you tapped it after that? Would it move the end of the selection or the beginning?