How to copy+paste from PlecoDict to a SMS?

A

alexinusa

Member
Ok, just got back from a 2months China trip. Then, found the PlecoDict software (how wonderful... - too bad I didn't have it in China!). Bought my first PDA (a Treo 680) to use that software (and replace my lost Nokia).

Anyway, spend the whole morning googling a simple newbie question:

how to I export/copy+paste some Chinese characters from PlecoDict to a memo or sms? I tried, but the result are only strange characters.

Do I need CJKOS for such a simple task, or what am I missing?
Looking forward to help,
thanks!
Alex
 
L

ldolse

状元
Depends on which country your SIM is from

If you're SIM is a U.S. carrier you're probably out of luck sending chinese SMS - I tried it and the unicode/gb2312/big5 data never made it through the sms gateway (Cingular/ATT). I use a chinese SIM now and never have a problem.

If you do use a U.S. carrier and the person you want to text with lives in China use the talk2china.com service instead. You'll need to be able to pick up email on your phone, but the treo can do that. It will be email on your side, and shows up as sms on their side, works pretty well and is more cost effective.

As far as copy paste on Palm OS I assume the pleco Edit-copy/paste menu works fine, but I don't have Palm.
 
A

alexinusa

Member
Thanks for the website "talk2china". Very nice! Plecodict gives me the pinying and I type it in my PC in Chinese characters and send it as SMS to my chinese friend, cool!

Still, there should be a way to directly use my Palm Treo. Now, again: my problem is that I cannot even export/copy+paste chinese characters from Plecodict to another program on my Treo. So my carrier has not yet anything to do with it (German O2 btw).

Anyone any idea how to export chinese character from Plecodict to another Palm program (memo, sms)?
 
A

alexinusa

Member
okay, thanks, I did that yesterday...
But then, as it says, my "PalmOS will become a multi-language system",
and all the menus are shown in Chinese (my Chinese is not so good yet that I could handle that...)
Mhm, I couldn't figure out if there is a way to use CJKOS just to be able to read/write Chinese characters/SMS in case I need it, with all the rest (OS menu) staying in English?
Is there?
 
S

Sarevok

进士
This copy/paste issue is causing problems also on my WM5 device. Lets say I will try to search for two-characters compound in Pleco and I cannot find it. ABC is a good dictionary, but some words are simply too specialized or obscure (or sometimes I am not satisfied with the definition in ABC and I want to see another one, with a different example sentence). I am switching to MDict in such cases, as I have many specialized technical dictionaries in there. But it would be much more convenient and faster if I could copy/paste the characters from Pleco, which I cannot (either using ctrl+c on the software keyboard or the "Copy" function from the menu). I have to switch to CE-Star and retype/rewrite those characters again, then switch to my default keyboard again... which is slowing me down. Is there a solution for this? Or is it just that the problem lies somewhere between the chair and the stylus?
 
H

hairyleprechaun

状元
Sarevok,

I have the same problem when trying to look up words in MDict that I have already entered into PlecoDict but cannot find/want to see a differnt definition for. I am not sure why the characters cannot be copied between programs.

On another note, can you give me a tip as to where you have found your MDict dictionaries? I have only been able to come across a few of them after searching the internet several times.

Darrol
 
S

Sarevok

进士
hairyleprechaun said:
On another note, can you give me a tip as to where you have found your MDict dictionaries? I have only been able to come across a few of them after searching the internet several times.
Click to expand...

Some of them on PxDxA, not only in this particular topic but in others as well, just perform a search on the forums using "MDict" as a keyword and few topics with dictionary databases should come up. And there was another forum site (also a chinese one) which I have already deleted from my bookmarks. Sadly, it was the one from which I have downloaded most of my dictionaries. Now I am not sure how did I find it then, maybe I followed a link somewhere on pxdxa, maybe I tried to run "mdict dictionary collection" or a similar phrase through Baidu (when I tried it now, there was a link to some collection on megaupload among the results... I don't know whether it's still working or not, megaupload doesn't work very well for me here... so just check it out). Hope that helps...

P.S.: Apart from chinese dictionaries, one of the best dictionary databases available for MDict is Wikipedia. A little bit dated (a version from June last year), but still... It is also available on Megaupload. You can get an up-to-date version (or a language version other than english) if you convert the database to the mdx format by yourself, but I was too lazy for that (and it is quite a painful process)
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Sarevok - unfortunately, there isn't really a workaround for this except the same "wait for 2.0" that I say to just about every Pocket PC text-related issue. In 2.0 we're using our own custom-designed user interface control to display dictionary definitions instead of the Windows-supplied one we currently use, and that should get clipboard support working much more smoothly.

It's a bit ironic, actually: Palm OS has virtually no multilingual support to speak of, but because of that people who want to enable Chinese on their Palms do so using a fast and well-written add-on program like CJKOS, which works great with our software and does so with virtually no effort on our part. Meanwhile, Microsoft did put Unicode support in Windows CE but they did a very shoddy job of it, so you have to store text in two or three different varieties of "clipboard" in order for it to actually copy and paste correctly and you run into lots of silly bugs like not being able to read Chinese fonts from a memory card. And the add-on programs to enable Chinese on Pocket PC are considerably less stable / refined than on Palm, both because there's less of a market for them and because it's a lot harder to push the Windows-supplied multilingual support out of the way than to add Chinese support to the English-only Palm OS.

It's a shame MDict doesn't go open-source, if they did we could write our own code to read MDict-format dictionary databases and let you access them from right within PlecoDict.
 
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