Find word in external app

Is there any easier way to find a flashcard entry in its original context outside Pleco than

select > copy > switch to [Kindle | Books | Pages… ] > search > paste?

those five clicks take just enough time to stop me.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Not that we're aware of; is there any feature in any of your reader apps to make an external bookmark link to a word? (e.g. you copy it out and then the copied text includes a URL that jumps you back to that spot in the app)
 
Thanks! According to Bing, you can make an external bookmark in the iOS Kindle app — but the menu option for sharing the URL does not appear when I follow Bing's instructions, and I doubt it exists.

Any chance Pleco Reader will soon be upgraded to handle long documents and permit annotation? That would meet my needs perfectly. Being able to set separate sizes for Chinese and Latin text would be great, too.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
We already do handle long documents - is there a particular way we're handling them badly? EPUBs do tend to be a bit fraught, though we're working on a cleaner / more reliable renderer for those, but if you concert your EPUB to text Pleco should be fine with even an extremely long document that way.

Annotations are coming, yes. Variable font sizes between Chinese and English in arbitrary rich-text documents can be a little fraught layout-wise but maybe something we can support as an expert option at least (with the understanding that in some cases this will completely mess up a document's formatting and we aren't necessarily going to be able to fix that if it does :) )
 
When I open a long document — just now Legge's bilingual Daodejing — I get this warning:

「Large File Edit

The current file is very large; editing it may cause Pleco to become slow and/ or unstable. Are you sure you want to continue?」

and when I edit, I immediately lose my place, usually flying to the beginning of the document.

Where fonts are concerned, all I'm really looking for is to have Latin and Chinese text in different sizes — when Chinese is big enough to read, the Latin characters are twice as large as they need to be. Looks clunky, and takes up to much of my screen.

A Closing Digression: in an age where any Apple, Facebook or Google customer is a voiceless chump, it's great to deal with the rare developers like Pleco who produce stellar software and give matching user support. Pleco 萬歲!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Thanks!

Ah, I didn't realize you were editing these files - so you want a way to both edit + track annotations on large files? (currently the annotation feature is only for fixed files) Can you give me any idea of what sort of annotations these are? (the annotation feature as presently constructed is mostly meant for highlighting words in e-books and such; for annotations in an edited file my inclination would be to embed them in the file itself as tags or some such, rather than overlaying the file with annotations that were fetched separately)
 
They'd all be short interpretive notes to myself, like

"cf 章 58。2"

or

"If s/he is what people despise? Don't see wèi as passive indicator, but wéi rén suõ… would seem more usual

wèi has to = 被 here?"

I hardly ever read anything post-Tang, so seldom find Apple or Amazon dictionaries satisfactory. If the Reader could evolve to a very basic word processor, it'd be a godsend for my translation efforts.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Are you on an iPad? One possibility would be to have the text open in Pleco on one side and in a text editor on the other; alternatively, you could turn on our clipboard monitoring feature and simply copy passages from your text editor to the clipboard to instantly pull them up in the Pleco reader.

To be honest, word processing isn't something we're really planning to do much with in Pleco - it's gotten a *little* better in 4.0, but we can only work on so many things and this particular function seems to be already pretty well served by other apps. (even more so once our desktop version launches)
 
My Pleco is mainly on an iPhone 12 mini, where I do something like what you suggest — copy chunks of text to the reader, examine it, then go back to whatever app I'm using to edit or annotate.

For the obsessive personality who needs to explore the tiniest textual possibilities, an app without SCM and Ricci can't be adequate. Is there any way — including buying another version — to integrate either of those with Word or Pages? When is Desktop Pleco coming?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Ah, that explains it, but as you can probably imagine, people writing Classical translations on their phones aren't exactly an enormous market :)

Desktop Pleco: Mac version pretty soon, Windows version is contingent on how that one sells.
 
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