Export: funny characters appear & Additional Questions

[Anonymous]

1) When I export my personally made lists from pleco, it gives me strange characters in the output in the prononciation column.

The '?''s you see below appear as tiny boxes in MS Word and Excel. They look like bar codes when I open it in Wenlin and emEditor. I'd upload an image of the ouput from msword and wenlin, but this board's upload feature appears to be turned off.

When I do a search and replace of them, it only removes one side, then I have to do another search and replace to remove the boxes from the otherside.

具體 jùtǐ (c: geuih tái) s.v. concrete; specific; particular
依法 yīfǎ (c: yī faat) v.o. according to law

If you are wondering what is the (c: ... ) it is the cantonese pronunciation of the word.

Is there anyway to fix this problem? I am exporting to my SD Card using the utf-8 file format, with the include user entry text box checked, and exported as a text file. Everything else with the export appears to work fine.

2) I see you have a new forum for flashcard lists. I have a ton of flashcard lists, but I do not want to spend the time to copy and paste them on the board. Is there an upload feature I can use to upload my lists?

3) I think your program is great and would be interested in promoting it for you. Do you or can you set up an affiliate program for those who help you promote?

Thank you much for your help.

 

[Anonymous]

4) I just noticed one more thing. It does not export the definitions with the chinese characters (if I only imported Chinese character list). This is probably due to licensing or copyright restrictions? *sigh* darn.

Is there a free / public domain dictionary which would allow exporting the definitions along with the chinese characters?

 

[mikelove]

1. Hmm... it looks like the UTF-8 converter may be exporting some of PlecoDict's internal formatting codes along with the dictionary text. Not sure why that would be happening, but assuming we can reproduce it it should be easy to fix in the next update. In the meantime, about all I can suggest is that you export in GB or Big5 - the formatting codes are definitely stripped from lists in those formats.

2. Yes, you should see an "Add an Attachment" option in the message composition screen when you try to post a message to that board.

3. Thanks! We do have something like that in the works, there should be an announcement about it coming very soon.

4. Yes, I'm afraid it is indeed a copyright issue. Unfortunately, you can't export definitions from free dictionaries either in the current release, but this should hopefully be corrected in version 2.0.

 

[Anonymous]

Thank you for the replies.

I tried exporting in both GB and Big5 but the chinese characters come out as funny characters and I cannot get them to display properly.

Very strange...

 

[mikelove]

That could be because your text editor doesn't support GB or Big5 - try opening the files in Microsoft Word, it should prompt you to select an encoding when you open them.

 

[haraldalbrecht]

Hello Mike,
l can second the problem with the "funny" characters in the UTF-8 export.

 

[mikelove]

Yes, I'm surprised we hadn't noticed this before now - it should be easy to fix in the 1.0.4 update. I'm not exactly sure about the release date for that, because it's probably going to include some other improvements to the flashcard exporter in order to allow people to easily transition their flashcards and custom dictionary entries to 2.0 once the first preview of that comes out.

 

[haraldalbrecht]

I'm surely not the first one to beg (again) for this: please, please be so kind as to add an export option so that also the statistic and ranking information can be exported ... and of course, later reimported.

 

[mikelove]

That will almost certainly be a part of version 2.0, but the changes to the flashcard system in 2.0 are significant enough that it may not be possible to carry over that data from 1.0. We'll try to preserve at least some of it, though.