Feature request (various things)

[mikelove]

Makes sense - it's the earlier 4/5 models where I'm worried about intruding too much on the search box, for 6 and later we're probably safe.

 

[bokane]

Possibly impractical feature request for the Reader: I would love to be able to choose line width/line height as well as font size. When I'm staring at Chinese onscreen for protracted periods of time, as I do on a pretty regular basis, my eyes eventually get tired and I start losing my place much more easily. Increasing line height and decreasing line width has been a pretty effective way of dealing with this for me, and it'd be great if Pleco could do something similar.

On the blue-sky, I-want-a-pony side of things, it would also be neat if Reader had a mode like Spritz and other focused-reading apps, though presumably this would require some pretty heavy-duty automatic sentence parsing. Displaying one character at a time wouldn't work; one word at a time might be okay; larger chunks of text would probably be better, but figuring out where to start and end them would be a massive pain.
(It would also be super-sweet if we could opt for columnar RTL text, but I'm not sure how useful anyone other than me would find it, and I'm sure it would an absolute bear to code, so maybe wait for Pleco 8.88 on this one.)

 

[mikelove]

We do already have an option for narrower line width - "larger margins" under the gear icon - but adjustable line height makes sense too.

As far as focused reading, that one is a bit more pie-in-the-sky, yeah - no text segmentation algorithm is perfect and anything less than perfection would be disastrous there.

Vertical text is a surprisingly popular feature request, not completely impossible but there'll be a more logical window to add it in 6-12 months or so when we're doing a major rewrite of our text field code to accompany another type design revamp.

 

[bokane]

Awesome! Thanks -- and yeah; the text-segmentation thing was more in the neighborhood of "it would also be nice if Pleco granted me the power to fly."

 

[dcarpent]

Just to add my two cents, put me down as another one who would like to be able to use Pleco with vertical text. Would this revamp extend to the pdf reader?

 

[mikelove]

We actually sort-of cover vertical text in the PDF reader now, at least we thought we did - is it misbehaving for you? Could you maybe email me a sample document?

 

[dcarpent]

OK. This is a scan from a book that I ocr'd using Adobe Acrobat. I have pretty good luck with such texts when they are horizontal, but when vertical they are useless.

 

[Trickyt57]

I can't use the PDF reader on the above text either. However, as a sort of work around you can always convert the PDF to an image and read the text vertically using the "still OCR" function of Pleco.

I tried it and could then read your vertical text.

Incidentally, I tried converting the image back to PDF but it didn't help.

 

[DonCachopo]

Feature request for the fill in the blanks test - prompt for characters.
After checking the answer, it'd be great if we could kept in screen the character we have drawn, so we can compare it with the real one
Thanks

 

[mikelove]

@dcarpent - this doesn't actually seem to be OCRed, all that our PDF reader is seeing here is images. The images do seem to come through pretty nicely in our OCR module though (which supports vertical text quite happily and appears to correctly detect it as the orientation of this document).

@DonCachopo - we actually do that now; the incorrect answer stays in the red box and if you tap on it it should pop up a definition for that incorrect character. However on Android that's only supported in our current beta version, not the release one.

 

[DonCachopo]

You are referring to this red box, aren't you?

What I want to see is my own drawing, so I can review what I did wrong. Even if pleco chose the correct character, sometimes I drew some stroke incorrectly. I want to review it and be able to compare my drawn character with the correct one

 

[dcarpent]

The file that I sent, "vertical text sample," was most definitely OCR'ed, using Adobe Acrobat Pro X. If I open the file in Acrobat I can select vertical text and paste it into a Word document and it show up correctly. What you are seeing is precisely the problem: Pleco Reader seems not to recognize the presence of the ocr'ed text. But I use Acrobat to ocr pdfs of horizontal Chinese text and am able to read them with Pleco, so it has something to do with the veritcal orientation.

 

[mikelove]

@DonCachopo - understood, thanks. Might be a little tricker to work that in but we'll see if we can do something in a future update - does seem like a useful addition.

@dcarpent - checking further this actually seems like it's an issue with our PDF decoder library (which we licensed from a third party) - they don't support documents with vertical text yet, though they claim to be working on it for the future. So we'll support it once they do.

 

[Shun]

Hi, I often find myself in the situation where I need to turn the auto-pronunciation on or off during a Flashcards test. Perhaps one could switch it on and off using a long-press on the speaker symbol? (sticky across Flashcards sessions)

Turning the sound on and off works, too, but then the sound clip is loaded for nothing, which consumes more battery power. Thanks!

 

[mikelove]

Makes sense. Frankly the battery impact is pretty minimal, though - audio playback power consumption is something they optimize heavily, which is why you can play music for hours with the screen off and barely see the battery meter go down at all

 

[Shun]

True, but there's also a very slight delay before the card is shown due to the sound being loaded. But thanks!

 

[DonCachopo]

Can you add a toggle on/off button during tests for "conceal handwriting until done"?
Sometimes I can only use one hand

 

[mikelove]

@DonCachopo - Would probably be better if we just had an alternative to the two-finger gesture, no? (a "commit" button or some such)

 

[DonCachopo]

That would do the trick too

 

[DonCachopo]

@DonCachopo - understood, thanks. Might be a little tricker to work that in but we'll see if we can do something in a future update - does seem like a useful addition.

Any progress on this?
Thanks!