Beta 7 Bug Report Thread

[sfrrr]

I can offer nothing to this thread. I just need to vent. I'm sitting in the library in a very rural part of Maine, and I discover that PD has revved again--to B7. Arghhh. Unless I can find someone in a nearby town (someone with broadband service), I'm going to have to wait until Tuesday to download the program. Deng3si3le. Waiting to death. Fei1 Fa1Feng1 buke3.



Sandra

 

[mikelove]

ipsi - yes, as ldolse says that icon is for the search query language rather than the dictionary now. Pretty much essential once we start to add dictionaries that include headwords in both English and Chinese (like Wiseman), and it seemed like the best approach for full-text searches too.

stephanhodges - 澴 actually isn't in the ABC dictionary, Wenlin's definition comes from their separate built-in character reference. Which I believe gets a lot of its definitions from Unihan, so that's probably why it matches the Unihan definition in the Char Info box.

With the import crash, Chinese characters in the category name actually shouldn't hurt anything, they just appear as empty boxes. The tabs in the later entries are a bit unusual too but they wouldn't cause any harm either since it stops looking for them after it gets to the definition. So since the file imports correctly on our Tapwave here I'm more inclined to think the crash came from some earlier action (corrupting the heap in a way that subsequently caused a crash when you exited the program) than from importing that file specifically - do you remember what else you were doing before you imported that file? If you undo the import and import the file again, does it still crash? If it does, could you send me your current flashcard database too? (might be something wrong in that)

The Change Buttons thing seems to happen every time that screen is launched, so that's definitely a bug - not sure how we missed it but it was very easy to reproduce/fix once we found it. (new in B7, caused by a change we made to the way scrollbars worked in the toolbar configuration form)

Jaybo2002 - that's a new one; do you have any other handwriting input software installed on your Tilt? Or another Chinese enabler like CE-Star? Or something else that might affect the way stylus commands are interpreted (like, say, a custom ROM that adds support for Touch-like finger controls)?

sfrrr - well you could always just download the .zip file of the new applications, that's only two and a half megabytes or so so depending on your data plan it should be usable right from the phone.

 

[ipsi]

On UTF-8, it doesn't seem to be remembering my position, and instead just goes to the first bookmark. In fact, it's not remembering my position at all. Oops.

Odd bug: Seems you have an overflow issue in the reader. Take 红楼梦 from http://china.panlogicsoftware.com/ebooks.html, should be UTF-8 (I'm using a UTF-16 version, but that's not necessarily relevant), and try going to the 15% mark - it should give you something ridiculous, like -9.654799...(%?). It's still usable, it's just no longer capable of showing how far through the book I am. Not that I've made it past the first page yet .

EDIT: You may want to update the 2.0 page on the website, as it doesn't mention Tuttle or Wiseman at the moment .

And I've also just noticed that I'm responsible for just over 5% of the posts on this board. Crazy.

 

[mikelove]

Two new bugs to report from our end which might help with testing:

1) On WM, saved session files are created but not deleted when the software is done with them (that code seems to just invite bugs for some reason), so after restoring from a saved session you'll need to go to \\Program Files\Pleco and delete the Pleco Saved Flash Session file from there.

2) The dictionary remapping feature doesn't work correctly with saved sessions, so if you want to use that feature don't use it with saved sessions, and if you want to save a session make sure you're not using dictionary remapping in it.

(both of these have now been fixed for the really-shouldn't-take-another-3-weeks Beta 8 )

ipsi - try deleting any Pleco Bookmarks / Pleco Reader Bookmarks files you have in memory (there might be two or three) and see if that gets them to save correctly. The % is indeed an overflow bug, multiplied before dividing when we should have divided before multiplying. And yeah, 5% is pretty crazy, particularly since you've only been here for a year and a half - sfrrr's in second place with about 4% but she's been here two years longer than you

 

[ipsi]

Ah yeah, that fixed it (Well, for now). I'm sure I deleted the original file before installing Beta 7. Odd. I'll let you know if it happens again.

What makes that even stranger is that I have rather more posts on here than on Chinese-Forums, despite CF being busier... Spamming FTW? Hmmm... Maybe Essay FTW... Or at least for 25%.

 

[ldolse]

Mike, how would that saved sessions bug manifest itself? I just had a situation where I was working through a 206 card multiple choice flashcard session. It took me two days to work my way through it, I finished it this afternoon. I put Pleco in the background and an hour or so later I went to start a new session, and Pleco asked me if I wanted to continue my existing session.... I said yes and I was back on card 166 of the previous 206 card session. Is that the same bug? I've seen this happen before, but I thought it was user error so didn't report it.

Different bug:

• I crashed Pleco again with a huge amount of text in the search field. I'd put just about every character under the 頁 radical into the input field, and I was deleting the 1st character(s) 1 by 1 to get their meanings. I probably got about half way through them when it crashed. It is generally much better behaved now with a huge amount of text in the text field though.
  
  The next statement more properly belongs in the features thread, but it would seem out of context if I put it there, so just putting it here. I was hoping when I put all those characters in the entry field that I could somehow either get them in the clipboard or get them sent to the directly to the reader. The reader would be much more efficient than the search dialog at checking them quickly, but there isn't any way to copy more than two lines of displayed text from the character input dialog. Since copy and paste is already there I think all that would be required is a 'select all' in the context menu, or alternatively have the stylus scroll the box so the user can select all the lines of text.

Last item:

• How many entries are supposed to be in the history? Looks to me like it's only ~55 items, which isn't really that many... It's possible some crashes have flushed it in the past. I'd like to watch it a bit more closely, but not sure what the design was for.

 

[mikelove]

ipsi - OK. There certainly could be something else wrong with the bookmark system changes, so do let me know if you see any more weird behavior.

And hey, on PlecoForums there's a direct relationship between what you post and what you download in the next beta, so until Roddy develops a video game in which you play a lowly British university student fighting your way through 50 levels of bureaucrats and visa offices and people bugging you with questions about Chinese character tattoos we'll have an edge over C-F on that front at least.

ldolse - yep, that definitely sounds like the bug - if you delete that file from your Program Files\Pleco folder it should stop prompting you about that every time you open flashcards. (we moved it from \\My Documents to \\Program Files but forgot to tell the file deletion code about it)

To be honest, the text field system in Pleco really isn't designed to be used for editing large documents right now, and I'm hesitant to do anything to encourage it because we really haven't gone in and done much work on accelerating / stabilizing it in that situation - at some point the reader will probably be joined by a document editor, and at that point we'd bring out a much more solid / powerful text edit field that could handle larger documents (even the reader's large document handling is kind of a hack at the moment), but I agree it would be nice to make it easier to select larger blocks of text so maybe in one of the .0.x releases we can get things stabilized enough to safely add a select all option. We'll see if we can reproduce this deletion crash though, that certainly shouldn't be happening.

The history list should be able to hold an even 100 searches.

 

[ldolse]

Thanks - I realize that the text field wasn't meant for working like that. I only used the text field because I didn't have any way to get the data to the reader. That was why I made the request about enhancing the select/clipboard functionality so that I could bypass the text field and use the reader. I agree that that qualifies as a feature though, so no worries.

Pretty sure I didn't have anywhere near 100 searches in the history, and I've been using 2.0 heavily at this point. I didn't count them individually, I just noted that there are only 3 entries per full scroll with a stylus click and I counted the number of clicks. I'll watch that a bit closer.

 

[ipsi]

Do you have a Chinese IME on your device? If so, just enter them in whichever text processor you like, then copy/paste to Pleco. Not ideal, but it will get them into the reader (Note that one of the settings for where to open the reader from is "Clipboard").

At least, that sounds like the easiest way for you to do what I think you want to do.

 

[ldolse]

I have several chinese IMEs, but the problem in this case was I was using Pleco's radical input to study general meaning across a bunch of characters under a given radical.... The only input option that can facilitate that is Pleco itself.

 

[stephanhodges]

The only input option that can facilitate that is Pleco itself.

You can enter radicals in Wenlin too, AFAIK

 

[ldolse]

stephanhodges - yes, been thinking about Wenlin for a while, but when I said that I meant IMEs/input on Windows Mobile, I know there are alternate desktop tools out there to accomplish this.

Found another bug:

• Look up 庁 ting1 in Tuttle
  In that entry there is a link to ban4gong1ting1 (tone marks used in the Pleco entry)
  Click that link, and Pleco attempts to look up bang4ong1ting1, and this fails to come up because the 'g' for gong1 wound up attached to ban4, becoming bang4.

 

[ldolse]

And another one:

• Start a multiple choice test session.
  Answer a few questions.
  After answering the last question, click the back button to review the previous card.
  Click the 'x' to stop your session, click yes to save the session.
  Re-open flashcards, click yes to continue the flashcard session.
  All the answers will be blank and you can't continue. Workaround is to stop the session again and re-enter one more time.

 

[sych]

In "Manage Flashcards", searching for multi-character headwords isn't working for me.

e.g, if I set the drop-down to "headword" and enter "可" I get:

可见
可以
可是
可惜

... and a whole slew of others. But if I enter "可见", or any of those other ones, I get no results from the search at all. The problem also affects headwords with 3 or more characters.

(Palm Treo 680)

PS - Mike, thanks for the gift, but I don't think I deserved it! I haven't been nearly as active in reporting bugs as I wanted to be, I've been finding myself very busy lately. Pleco 2 is great; especially the stroke-order diagrams and automatic repetition spacing are just killer features for me!

 

[sych]

Oh, one more.

I did an import from XML in this version, and as I was doing it I ran out of memory/"disk space". However Pleco continued to count cards being added to the database, it wasn't until later that I discovered I was missing about 1000 cards. It looks like either SQLLite didn't report the error to Pleco, or Pleco didn't check for it or just ignored it.

In future some sort of handing or notification of failed DB writes would be nice On the other hand, nothing crashed, so that's a plus!

 

[Sarevok]

And another one:

• Start a multiple choice test session.
  Answer a few questions.
  After answering the last question, click the back button to review the previous card.
  Click the 'x' to stop your session, click yes to save the session.
  Re-open flashcards, click yes to continue the flashcard session.
  All the answers will be blank and you can't continue. Workaround is to stop the session again and re-enter one more time.

I noticed this in flashcards modes other than multiple choice test as well, in the simple "Reading" session to be specific. Restarting the application had to be included sometimes (and also a soft-reset once) to make that workaround work for me.

I also noticed another bug which probably has something to do with the saved sessions. When prompted whether I wanted to resume a previously interrupted session I selected NO, entered the flashcards screen but was unable to start another session then - I always got the message of no cards matching my selected criteria being found (even when I tried to switch to a different profile and thus a different scorefile and also when selecting a category never reviewed before and thus not having any repetition spacing scores to speak of). Restarting the application was needed in such a case.

The next issue is probably more of a feature than a bug, but a feature I certainly don't like very much. Selecting a text (Chinese and English alike) anywhere in the application being it in flashcards or the dictionary input field does not make it appear selected for another applications, thus making it unable to use the instant-access-like-function of Mdict and other dictionary software (I occasionally want to check a meaning of an English word in English-Czech dictionary this way). In 1.0 it was possible to use the "Copy to Input Field" function, the characters copied to the input field became automatically selected and I could trigger that Mdict function (by an icon or previously mapped hardware button) to immidiately see the definition from the currently loaded Mdict dictionary (I have mostly chinese-chinese dictionaries in there and I sometimes need to refer to them for some additional usage explanations of a particular word). This was also possible in flashcards session when I selected some words manually with the stylus but is no longer possible anywhere in 2.0, forcing me to use the clipboard function (which is comparatively slower). Well, I can live with that, it just makes the living a bit more inconvenient Will this be possible in the finished version or at least in 2.1?

 

[stephanhodges]

Palm Tapcis. Some issues in reader.
Email sent with screen shots attached.

======
Reader (example F.TXT from the http://china.panlogicsoftware.com site)

• Showing a lot of useless info from UNI dictionary (UNI_Dict_Popup.png) in pop-up or bottom dictionary window.
  Advancing using RIGHT arrow on pop up doesn't advance actual text cursor position
  Advancing doesn't always advance. (WontAdvance.png - Cannot advance past 2nd character if started at 1st)

Was opened with "UTF-16" selected, which turned out to be wrong. Needed to be UTF-8

Perhaps I am trying to advance too quickly? Sometimes if I wait a while, it will eventually advance. THERE IS NO VISUAL INDICATOR that it is "advancing".

I tried same file as Both UTF-16 variants, and also as UTF-8

It's strange that you can get to the pop up menu (Magnify, look up, etc) from within the pop-up window, but cannot get them directly from the reader.

You also get the pop up menu from the reader dictionary bar (at bottom).

Feature Req: Able to toggle the bottom dictionary bar on/off from the reader screen (or minimize) Reason: It's larger than the pop-up, and often faster to move around the text, but if not needed, the extra screen space would be useful (especially on smaller devices).
Feature: Be able to add notes to document. They could be part of bookmark system.

BUG: Sometimes after selecting a character, the menu comes up, but cannot get Character Info. It worked 1st time on a character (just clicked the character). Clicking again on the character and the Character Info didn't come up. Wouldn't come up from the "Char Info" pop up menu either. Changed to another word and it worked there, changed back and it worked again multiple times...

Highlight text in the bottom reader dictionary bar and press magnify. Doesn't work correctly. Sometimes shows a dark "empty" box (selected pinyin), sometimes nothing (selected English text). Works OK for Chinese.

Extremely hard to resize the bottom dictionary bar. Hard to select. Perhaps a "wider" selection area?

Sometimes the file name is shown on the reader screen and sometimes not. Perhaps if Bookmark is selected, it could show the file name in the title of that pop-up, etc?

ABC Lookup of "de" in reader pop up window seems incorrect. Bad_De_Definition.png)

Bookmark pop up list window could be much taller and should be at least double the current width. (BookmarMenu.png)

In the "Manage Bookmark" screen, could you show file position? Able to Sort by name as well as position. Perhaps also have the date and time of bookmark...

There's no way to see where the bookmark is on the page. Could the display routing "insert" a MARKER character (not actually change the file).?

Bug: Main dictionary page Dictionary history has a blank line at bottom (BlankHistoryLine.png)

 

[sych]

Problems with Instant Access.
Treo 680 (GSM, using CJKOS with localisation turned on)

In Blazer, pressing my Instant Access button causes a soft reset. If using the "Experimental Mode", I see the command bar pop up for the "copy" action, then the device resets. The IA window doesn't appear. On the other text extraction modes, nothing changes on the screen, and the crash occurs a few fractions of a second after pressing my Instant Access button.

In Docs To Go, opening Instant Access, playing audio, then pressing "Done" causes a soft reset. Doesn't crash if I don't play the audio.

Error message in both cases is Fatal Exception while running "Pleco".

I have tried all 3 text extraction modes, with the same result. Neither of these problems were present in B6. My Instant Access button is the "pause" button on the side of the phone (below the volume control). Pocket Tunes is installed but not running.

EDIT: I'm getting similar behaviour to the problem with DocsToGo when using IA in SuperMemo for Palm. (open IA, play audio, tap done, get crash)

 

[estudiando]

I'm not sure if this is a bug, but the input is disabled when the dictionary is searching (can't use the Pleco keyboard or the system keyboard -palm TX). I know I can put a time delay before the search starts, but often I miss that time window and when I type some of the characters they are not detected/registered. Seems like a priority issue (don't know anything about the internals of PalmOS) where the dictionary application takes priority over the user input.

 

[sych]

Yeah, similar to estudianto, I find that the keyboard input buffering is less than ideal... if I enter a keystroke into the dictionary's search field while it's busy doing something, it is often not registered. Pleco 1 was a lot better in this regard. Would be good if something could be done about it.