Updated E-C Dictionary Test

[mikelove]

These will be in the "Updates" tab in a few days, but if you'd like to check them out early, load this file into Pleco (via the built-in web browser or a USB upload):

http://cdn.pleco.com/iospackages/p2updatedectest-130113.zip

Open up the Pleco File Manager (Settings / File Manager), tap on it once to unzip it, then tap on each "plecopackage" file inside of it to install the updated version of that dictionary.

Basically, we've cleaned up ABC E-C / 21C / NWP to greatly improve the formatting and fix most of their errors / Pinyin glitches / etc, and in ABC and NWP we also dug out a number of entries that had been buried or otherwise inaccessible before. So all-in-all these should be a pretty major upgrade over the previous versions.

 

[Alexis]

Very Nice. Much more readable.

Is it intentional to have carriage returns after the diamonds (that mark the parts of spech)?

 

[mikelove]

Very Nice. Much more readable.

Thanks!

Is it intentional to have carriage returns after the diamonds (that mark the parts of spech)?

Intentional but not desirable - relic of our old entry formatting system which we'll get rid of once we debut our new type design.

The big goal has been to get all of our dictionaries semantically tagged, so that we can now apply whatever formatting we want to a particular section rather than simply mimicking whatever was bold / underlined / etc in the original dictionary data files, and E-C dictionaries are far and away the most challenging type to do this in. (Chinese-English dictionary entries are generally structured much more simply, even when they're quite long, and Chinese-Chinese dictionaries almost never use text formatting to connote structure but instead use punctuation which is much easier to deal with - if GF has a ⇒ somewhere we know exactly what that means)

ABC E-C was actually already tagged, but we hadn't yet released a version of it on iOS that reflected the work they've done the last year or two at making sub-headwords searchable; 21C and NWP were both in terrible shape / not tagged at all, so those required a great deal of labor to tag properly and we're hoping that releasing those updates now will help flush out any lingering issues in that tagging before the big update.

An added benefit to all of this is that we can start doing more things with different parts of entries now that we can easily identify them - more elaborate search filters ("limit search to nouns," something we've had a lot of requests for), better independent manipulation of example sentences (audio button next to each sentence to hear it with TTS, search for examples containing this word, create flashcards based on examples, etc), the ability to view condensed / collapsed entries which you can then expand on, etc.

 

[insighter]

If we don't want to do this manually is there an upcoming update that this will be automatically bundled with?

 

[mikelove]

If we don't want to do this manually is there an upcoming update that this will be automatically bundled with?

Already out, check your "Updates" tab.