Highlighting Words in Text

[Petewinn]

Dear Mike and Pleco,

Is there any way to highlight words in a text in the reader? I have both Pleco and Wenlin and am running into the same issue - this is very common for all students of Chinese. We go through a text, and we want to mark the words in the text that are new to us. We need some way, e.g. highlight with a background color, in bold or underline, to quickly scan through the text and find these words again. This is very helpful for review and seems like a pretty basic function.

To put this in perspective if you grab any actual offline textbooks or articles students of Chinese have used for assignments, you'll find that they highlight the new vocab in the text. We just want to have the same function we use in the offline world.

Example: "The new vocabulary in this sentence is this word, and because it is underlined I can refer to it quickly."

Right now the only workaround - very inconvenient - is to keep 2 copies of the text, one in Pleco (which does not have this highlighting or underlining feature) and one in MS Word (which does).

Any suggestions on how to do this more easily?

Thanks very much!

Pete

 

[mikelove]

Sorry I missed this one before.

Anyway, I'm afraid there's no way to do this at the moment, except possibly with a web-based highlighting solution and our document reader set to Live Mode.

As far as the possibility of adding it, the trickiest part of this is the text segmentation - identifying the boundaries between words so that if (for example) you have a 3-character string in which the first+second and second+third characters each constitute a word, you know which one actually is. (so a lot more complicated than just a find and replace, in other words)

Manually highlighting words should be supported in our 2.4 update, though.

 

[Petewinn]

Great, Mike!
Can I suggest when you click on a word and the definition popup opens, that there's a button to press for "leave highlighted"?
That would be GREAT!
When is 2.4 update expected to be out?
Thanks again,
Peter

 

[Petewinn]

BTW, I'm talking here only about manually highlighting.

 

[mikelove]

Great, Mike!
Can I suggest when you click on a word and the definition popup opens, that there's a button to press for "leave highlighted"?

We were thinking something along those lines, yes - a button to basically create a text-range-specific bookmark.

When is 2.4 update expected to be out?

No idea, we don't even seem to be able to predict 2.3 with any accuracy - this is more of a roadmap than a release date statement, reader and flashcard enhancements are what we're doing in the next big update after the one that we're currently working on.

 

[Petewinn]

Darn...that just gives us another excuse to procrastinate on studying Chinese.