Copying Reader pop-up defs

[chinapete]

Mike, congratulations on the update, agree with and am happy to see all the rave reviews you're getting here ...

Question: In the past I could bring up a definition for text in the Reader and could copy the contents of that definition to a text editor, now seem to have lost that ability as only the target word copies to the clipboard, even though word and def are selected...

 

[mikelove]

We've had one other report about this and thus far we're quite baffled by it; we can't reproduce it here and can't think of a reason why it would happen. Would you please describe the procedure you're using for this in as much detail as you can? Also, is this iOS 6 or 7, iPhone or iPad?

 

[chinapete]

iOS 7 on iPhone 5, mini-iPad and iPad retina ... Attached shows the target word selects along with definition, but only target word copies to pasteboard ... Sorry if this has been asked and answered ...

It hasn't been a good day, PlainText updated and doesn't appear to sync well with Dropbox, all Chinese characters carried over from Pleco are lost in translation ... But that's another thread ...

 

[mikelove]

Ah, that explains it - actually the bug here is that you're able to highlight text in the popup reader, since as part of our effort to consolidate our two formerly separate text selections systems we're trying to avoid having two active highlights at the same time. (the definition bubble should now be thought of as a replacement for the Copy/Define/etc bubble that normally pops up when you highlight text on iOS)

So instead, tap on the > button to bring up the entry on a separate screen - then, tap-hold on one of the dictionary icons in that screen and you'll see an option in the menu that pops up to copy the entire dictionary entry. (so overall probably about the same amount of effort as painstakingly drag-selecting the text you wanted in the popup)

 

[chinapete]

Mike,

It's a small miracle how you're always able to answer everyone so quickly and with such detailed advice and fixes ... I'm probably the rare user who wants to bring up a definition in the Reader and then copy that def to another application, so I'm sure this isn't a front-burner issue ... But fyi, there now are a lot more steps to complete a copy of the target word along with a definition from a chosen dictionary ...

The reason is that when you tap the > button to bring up the separate screen, you find that the target word is isolated in a separate field, and it isn't possible to copy it along with the body text of the definition (from whatever dictionary has been chosen), even when "View in Browser" is selected ... I hope I'm wrong about that, but for now the path I've found is to copy the target word first, paste it into my text editor, then go back and grab the fuller definition ...

But ... when I copy the contents of the target word field, the sound icon that's always present exports as a coffee cup (see attached .pdf exported from Day One; I also exported to Page and got the same result) ... It's very difficult, on the iPhone at least, not to include the sound icon as part of a quick copy of the field's contents ...

I gotta switch to decaf

 

[mikelove]

If you tap-hold on one of the dictionary abbreviation icons on the definition screen, you'll see an option in the menu that pops up to copy the entire entry, which will include both the headword / pinyin and that dictionary's definition.

 

[chinapete]

Mike, I got it, thanks, with Copy to cilpboard, PlainText wasn't showing the hanzi ... But now I can see the full entry in Day One ...

 

[mikelove]

Great!

Oh, and the coffee cup thing was an in-house joke (needed a character code to assign to our audio symbol in our custom font) which we completely forgot would show up outside of Pleco when copy-and-pasted - not sure now whether we should keep it as a tiny easter egg which Pleco users can joke about with other Pleco users or whether we should strip it out in the interest of cleaner copy-and-pasted text.

 

[chinapete]

haha, you're working 24/7 AND having fun, how great is that!?

 

[denmitch]

So, how late do you drink coffee? ;-)