Feature Suggestions

[Henry]

I'd like to see a pop-up 'calligraphy-style' font, similar to the optional 96 pixel font.

I often find myself writing birthday cards and such where I want to write the characters more beautifully, but it is hard to find examples of each character... if there was an optional 'beautiful font' that would be great

 

[The Duelist]

Hi Mike

In 'Manage Flashcards -> Search Settings' Would It Be Possible To
Specify Categories To Include & Exclude From The Found Set?
ie 'Category' [ = | != ] CatX [ -- | AND | OR ]

TIA
The Duelist

 

[weight]

Mike, can I get you to commit to either fixing this (in a future release of course) or putting a button in somewhere that allows you to not only automatically copy the character and pronunciation from a built in entry to a custom entry, but also the entire definition. I can't tell you how often I have to fix the pronunciation of built in dictionaries to the somewhat differently pronounced Mandarin they use here in Taiwan. In 1.0 this is a pain in the butt and I was totally drooling over the possibility of a faster way. Just allowing the selection of smallish entries in the edit card screen will most likely not be useful as most of the definitions I'm working with are longer than the maximum that can be selected there.

Thank you

Yeah, getting that longer-selection feature working correctly proved rather tricky so we decided not to bother with it in 2.0.0 at least.

 

[radioman]

For what it is worth, I do think being able to drive the phrases through the flashcard system has value for reviewing them in a formal review cycle, just like the words today.

But with that said, for now, I would like to do is simply save some of the phrases easily into the reader. The problem is that I can drop it into the clipboard and move it to the reader (no problem), but if I do that, the previous phrase would be overwritten.

Is there any easy way where, if I see a phrase, I can just copy the phrase (no parsing to flashcards), including Hanzi, English definitions, or whatever, and move it right into a specified file that can be opened by the reader? (so I highlight the text and press a button or get a pop-up menu that lets me append the file with the newly highlighted text).

Not sure if this functionality exists today, but thought I would ask.

radioman - A phrase-collection flashcard feature is a great idea - we haven't really optimized the flashcard system around phrases yet in general (it certainly supports them, but we don't do some common-sense things like making the headword characters smaller when there are more than, say, 8 of them, or allowing audio playback for an unlimited number of syllables) but we've got a few people here using them for phrases anyway and certainly once we do get around to improving phrase support it would make sense to add a way to capture phrases from within definitions. (or the document reader, which might be an even more useful place for this)

 

[mikelove]

Henry - we tried unsuccessfully to license one of those a while ago, if an opportunity comes up to license another one we'd certainly consider it though.

The Duelist - I think a few people have mentioned a "not in" category option for Manage Flashcards, actually - should be quite doable post-2.0 since we already have the logic for it set up for flashcard sessions.

weight - well at some point it'll certainly be fixed, I'm just not sure when - given that we're planning to heavily restructure the text handling system once we stop supporting Palm OS (and hence can start doing more processor-intensive font display things like kerning / fractional pixel widths / smarter anti-aliasing) we may not be making many improvements to that area before then (not wanting to have to throw them out once we overhaul it).

radioman - not really any way to do that right now, Pleco doesn't have any built-in document editing capability so you'd have to copy and paste it into another program. But certainly an area for future improvement.

 

[TroiOi]

Hi Mike,

I just want a simple thing . Could you plz re enable text input for External Pleco like 1.0 version? Currently, I use VBook to read chinese text but cannot using external Pleco 2.0 cause it neither capture the copy text nor permit to input manually.

 

[westmeadboy]

...well at some point it'll certainly be fixed, I'm just not sure when - given that we're planning to heavily restructure the text handling system once we stop supporting Palm OS (and hence can start doing more processor-intensive font display things like kerning / fractional pixel widths / smarter anti-aliasing) we may not be making many improvements to that area before then (not wanting to have to throw them out once we overhaul it).

I vaguely remember you saying 2.0 would be the last version supporting Palm. Do you mean the last MAJOR version, or will you be bringing out a 2.1 for Palm too?

Not that I'm biased, but I think it would be a great idea to branch the code as soon as Pleco 2.0 is released (or have you done that already?). On the Palm branch you could just do bug-fixes. On the Windows branch you could start all that text-handling and WM-style UI stuff (as well as bug fixes). Sure, you may end up duplicating a lot of bug fixing work - but Pleco 2.0 is largely bug-free now anyway :wink:

Just my 2cts.

 

[mikelove]

TroiOi - that's a bit tricky with Instant Access on Palm but it's definitely on our to-do list for sometime after 2.0.

westmeadboy - not sure yet about 2.1 on Palm, it's going to depend a lot on whether Palm OS sales continue to hold up after we release 2.0. (right now they're still quite respectable, but with the WM version getting markedly better / easier to install in 2.0 that may change soon) So there'll probably at least be a brief period where the codebase is simultaneously supporting Palm, WM, and iPhone.

 

[weight]

Would it be possible to make newly pasted custom tab text not disappear when switching between the "custom" and "From Dict" tab? That way I could get a dictionary entry to a custom entry with two or three cut and pastes.

weight - well at some point it'll certainly be fixed, I'm just not sure when - given that we're planning to heavily restructure the text handling system once we stop supporting Palm OS (and hence can start doing more processor-intensive font display things like kerning / fractional pixel widths / smarter anti-aliasing) we may not be making many improvements to that area before then (not wanting to have to throw them out once we overhaul it).

 

[mikelove]

We'll see - might still have to wait until after 2.0 but that does sound like a sensible / very easy fix.

 

[The Duelist]

I Think The Review Only Test
Should Display Flashcards In The Order In Which They Are Entered.
(Similar To PD1)
That Way You Can Check/Review With Textbook Word Lists.

 

[weight]

I'm seconding this; but I think Mike had explained earlier that there was some technical problem that was preventing him from doing so.

I Think The Review Only Test
Should Display Flashcards In The Order In Which They Are Entered.
(Similar To PD1)
That Way You Can Check/Review With Textbook Word Lists.

 

[mikelove]

You can approximate this behavior a little bit if you set "Card Selection" to "Random" and check the "Don't Shuffle" box - that sorts the cards in the session by their internal ID code, which since the IDs are assigned sequentially means that newer cards would come up after older cards.

But it's not possible to review cards in a session in an arbitrary sort order in 2.0; we might try to add that functionality back again in 2.1 but it's really tricky programming-wise (particularly on Palm, where loading yet another database table in the course of starting a flashcard session is likely to lead to a whole bunch of new out-of-memory errors).

 

[The Duelist]

You can approximate this behavior a little bit if you set "Card Selection" to "Random" and check the "Don't Shuffle" box - that sorts the cards in the session by their internal ID code, which since the IDs are assigned sequentially means that newer cards would come up after older cards.

Thanks For The 'Hint'.
I Hadn't Found The 'Don't Shuffle' Option.
(To Me, 'Hiding' The 'Don't Shuffle' Option Under 'Card Selection -> Random' Seems Very Counter-Intuitive. :wink: )

I Also Think The 'Don't Shuffle' Option
Should Present Cards In The Order That 'Categories/Sub-Categories' Are Organized.
ie. When 'Don't Shuffle' & Multiple Categories Are Selected,
Cards In Higher Categories Are Presented Before Those In Lower Categories.

BTW: What Happens When 'Compact Flash/ User Databases' Is Executed?
Is It ReSorting/ReOrganising The DB (By Category Structure),
Or Just Reclaiming 'Space' ?

 

[anchan42]

Re: Feature Suggestions- flash card

I would like to be able to choose not to display the character outline in stroke order test mode.
I want to test myself if I can write Chinese purely from my memory. I can generally get the stroke order correct if I remember how the character looks like.

The sketch pad could be popup sketch pad. It will give us the ability to practice writing when we feel like it and not permanently taken up the valuable screen space.

 

[mikelove]

The Duelist - Yeah, we're actually tweaking a few bits of the interface in the course of finishing the instruction manual and I'm inclined towards taking that option out of Random and giving it its own separate menu item ("Fixed"). That also provides something we can easily hang additional sorting features off of later if we decide to add those back in. (pedagogically I think it's an absolutely terrible idea to be studying characters in the same order each time, but if we insisted on only implementing things we wanted to use ourselves our software would have half as many features and 1/3 as many users)

The Compact option doesn't reorganize or re-sort anything, it just consolidates the database records in as few blocks as possible to save space. When you delete a database record, in order to avoid having to reshuffle the entire database around SQLite just leaves a blank space where the record used to be; it can usually reuse those spaces later, but if you run the Compact command that will get rid of all of those extra gaps left by deleted records and make the database smaller (and possibly also a bit faster). The IDs, sort order, etc all stay the same though.

anchan42 - you can test characters that way using a "Free answer" test, that'll give you a standard Pleco handwriting recognizer and prompt you to write in the characters without giving you outlines for them.

 

[Mator]

Hey Mike,

I really like being able to save a flashcard session and get back to the main screen, but I'm finding many times that I've needed to get into "manage categories" or "manage flashcards" before finishing a flashcard session and/or reviewing missed cards (so I can search cards, categories, set default cat, etc). Would it be possible to make any of it accessible without first deleting the flashcard session?

 

[mikelove]

Possibly the default flashcard category - we've thought about giving that its own separate dialog, letting you select multiple categories for it and letting you bring it up right from the Add to Flash popup menu. (perhaps as early as a 2.0.x-type bugfix release if we get a lot of requests for it) The other screens would be really hard to sync up with saved sessions, though - might be possible eventually but not until long after 2.0 is out.

 

[radioman]

I would vote strongly to have the ability to get back into manage flashcards without needing to bail out of a flashcard session completely.

 

[radioman]

Audio Files - I know I brought this up before, that the files are already baked, and that new files are already being added to the audio library.

Probably beyond the scope of the current application (e.g., audio sampling and modifications) but would it be possible that, for highlighted Hanzi or Pinyin, you can collect the audio files, then via software remove the silent portions of the files, to string the sylables together more tightly?

I personally do not care if the audio was a bit delayed to support the audio collection effort.

Not sure if this would result in anything that actually sounds real good but thought I would throw this approach out there.