Would be nice if...?

Mads

举人
I was just wondering if these two things might be made possible, in an update of OXCD?

1. Combining pinyin and characters.

Because chinese has so many homophones (sp?) and I'm not always sure of the tones, I sometimes find that it would be a help to combine characters and pinyin in the input area.

2. Search backwards

It would also be nice to have the possibilty to write the second or third (etc.) character and then look for the preceeding characters in the word. (sorry if this doesn't make sense hope you see what i mean :? )

also...

when i higlight a word to transfer to input area, it only transfer half of it when the word are on two lines.

when i tap a character to magnify it, it shows the character next to it! (i'm using a TE)
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
1) Possibly, but I don't think it's going to make it into the initial release of PlecoDict. It's rather difficult and the prevailing opinion among our customers seemed to be that #2 was a higher priority.

2) Yes, this is already working quite well in our development versions and barring any sudden catastrophes should definitely be in PlecoDict 1.0. It's actually a full-fledged wildcard feature, so if you know the first and third characters in a word but not the second, this will let you list all words in the dictionary that match with those two characters.

3) This is a known bug with our software on Palm OS 5, and I'm afraid it's unlikely that it will be fixed until PlecoDict comes out. Sorry.

4) Are you sure that your T|E's digitizer is calibrated correctly? (you can re-calibrate it in Prefs) Does this happen with any character or just some? Can you give me an example of an entry where this happens? We've been pretty thorough at testing the magnification system for bugs, so I'm surprised to hear it's still not working correctly.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Correction on #1: I've checked back and there actually is a decent chance that this might make it into PlecoDict 1.0 after all. It's far from certain, but we've already got most of the code we need to do it, so the big question is simply whether or not it's worth the additional storage space that the extra indexing data would take up.

And on #3 it looks like we might have that fixed for the final release of 2.1. Here's hoping anyway.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Hmm, working OK on mine... are you using CJKOS or anything like that? Try turning it off. And I'll repeat my question about digitizer calibration, that can definitely cause problems too.
 

Mads

举人
Thanks for the answers and sorry about the late reply.

I wasn't aware about the problem being caused by CJKOS. It works fine now.

Can't wait for plecodict. I'm a heavy user of your program and its a great help in my studies.

Mads
 
What kind of problems does CJKOS cause? Is it any reason for getting a different Chinese system instead?
And is there any chance you could also include in PlecoDict a built in Chinese system a la CJKOS, so we can view Chinese in any application and do not need CJKOS at all?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I'm not sure if any of the other Chinese systems fare any better on this - the main CJKOS-related problem we're aware of is the inability to magnify characters correctly, and this *should* be fixed in PlecoDict as we've now set up things in such a way that CJKOS is never involved (and hence doesn't have the opportunity to screw things up).

And it's extremely unlikely that we'll ever include CJKOS-like features in our own software; before Palm OS 5 came out it actually might have been doable, but in Palm OS 5 they changed things around so that it's no longer easily possible to 'patch' the system to get it to display Chinese characters; you have to do a very specialized kind of hack which is unsupported by PalmSource and could easily be broken on a future OS version. Supporting this would be a ton of work, and frankly since there already are several other products available that do the job perfectly well we see no reason to release our own, especially not with PlecoDict's new font system largely eliminating the potential for conflicts.

Some people have suggested that we simply license CJKOS or ChOS or some other such system and include it with the dictionary in place of our current font system, but unfortunately these OS'es just don't support enough characters - in the new ABC dictionary alone there are something like 1000 characters that aren't part of either the GB or Big5 standards and hence aren't displayable by CJKOS, on top of which there's no way to easily toggle between traditional and simplified characters unless you build that feature into the system as we do with our own OS.
 
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