iPhone Feature Requests

[mikelove]

A text file or to the iOS copy heaven so that it can be pasted in notebook or writeroom something like that.

Makes sense, thanks.

 

[character]

In the OCR Block Recognizer, it would be nice to have some kind of HWR/RAD/Key recognizer overlay for those times when the OCR can't recognize a character. Zoom in on the character, pop up the overlay and write the character, look it up by radical, or try to guess the pinyin.

Too tough to implement?

 

[mikelove]

In the OCR Block Recognizer, it would be nice to have some kind of HWR/RAD/Key recognizer overlay for those times when the OCR can't recognize a character. Zoom in on the character, pop up the overlay and write the character, look it up by radical, or try to guess the pinyin.

Too tough to implement?

Sorry, just didn't see that post.

We already have this; tap-hold on the incorrect character and a handwriting box will pop up with the character on the image zoomed in as the background and the list of alternate OCR matches in the handwriting candidate box.

 

[character]

We already have this; tap-hold on the incorrect character and a handwriting box will pop up with the character on the image zoomed in as the background and the list of alternate OCR matches in the handwriting candidate box.

Thanks Mike. This is great, but it does not work if the character hasn't been recognized at all. Instead the nearest recognized character is loaded into the handwriting box. I don't know if you want add the ability to insert characters in between recognized ones. Also, when I was trying the handwriting box I couldn't get it to recognize alphanumerics and Chinese quote marks. I guess the functionality here depends on how much you expect this view to be used to create a clean text for Capture, or if the cleanup should happen after Capture.

Another OCR-related feature that would be nice is if numbers/letters/etc. recognized were scaled closer to the size of the surrounding recognized characters.

Right now it can look like:
2 0 0 劶

 

[mikelove]

Thanks Mike. This is great, but it does not work if the character hasn't been recognized at all. Instead the nearest recognized character is loaded into the handwriting box. I don't know if you want add the ability to insert characters in between recognized ones. Also, when I was trying the handwriting box I couldn't get it to recognize alphanumerics and Chinese quote marks. I guess the functionality here depends on how much you expect this view to be used to create a clean text for Capture, or if the cleanup should happen after Capture.

I'm inclined towards the former, though I suppose the ideal would be if we combined them so that you could go back and forth - definitely a major area for future OCR upgrades.

Another OCR-related feature that would be nice is if numbers/letters/etc. recognized were scaled closer to the size of the surrounding recognized characters.

That one's harder to fix since the system is reporting those as the locations / sizes of the numbers - so this is an actual sequence of letters that are the same size as the 劶 but appearing much smaller?

 

[character]

That one's harder to fix since the system is reporting those as the locations / sizes of the numbers - so this is an actual sequence of letters that are the same size as the 劶 but appearing much smaller?

Yes, the number are about the same size as the character; emailed you an example image on which you can try OCR.

 

[mikelove]

Yes, the number are about the same size as the character; emailed you an example image on which you can try OCR.

Thanks - very odd, have to figure out what the recognizer thinks it's seeing here...

 

[pprendeville]

Is it possible for Pleco to have a text to speech option? I use 2 apps at the moment for studying in college. The first is Prizmo which allows me to take a picture of text in a book and it converts it to text in my phone and it can read the text back to me (option of purchasing American, British, Dutch etc voices which is kinda cool). The other App is Web Reader which a little bit more sophisticated in that it can read word and PDF files although there is still some ironing out of problems to be sorted. It's very handy when you are on the move and is a great alternative to reading.

Only problem is none of these reads Chinese characters. Would love if Pleco could do this as it would allow be to do study while I'm out on my bike.

 

[mikelove]

Is it possible for Pleco to have a text to speech option? I use 2 apps at the moment for studying in college. The first is Prizmo which allows me to take a picture of text in a book and it converts it to text in my phone and it can read the text back to me (option of purchasing American, British, Dutch etc voices which is kinda cool). The other App is Web Reader which a little bit more sophisticated in that it can read word and PDF files although there is still some ironing out of problems to be sorted. It's very handy when you are on the move and is a great alternative to reading.

Only problem is none of these reads Chinese characters. Would love if Pleco could do this as it would allow be to do study while I'm out on my bike.

That's definitely coming, yes - in 2.3 if not sooner, we already licensed TTS engines for Chinese and for English.

 

[pprendeville]

Is it possible for Pleco to have a text to speech option? I use 2 apps at the moment for studying in college. The first is Prizmo which allows me to take a picture of text in a book and it converts it to text in my phone and it can read the text back to me (option of purchasing American, British, Dutch etc voices which is kinda cool). The other App is Web Reader which a little bit more sophisticated in that it can read word and PDF files although there is still some ironing out of problems to be sorted. It's very handy when you are on the move and is a great alternative to reading.

Only problem is none of these reads Chinese characters. Would love if Pleco could do this as it would allow be to do study while I'm out on my bike.

That's definitely coming, yes - in 2.3 if not sooner, we already licensed TTS engines for Chinese and for English.

Looking forward to that. Will allow me to get out and about and listen to my lecture dialogues saving me lots of library time.

Any idea on an approximate release date?

 

[pprendeville]

In relation to flashcards, I'd love to be able to automate the learning process as such. For example, if I've created a category based on a new chapter of our textbook and added all the new vocab. From here it would be nice to be able to press a play button and have the characters/definition appear and then show you the stroke order for the character (draw it out) before moving onto the next character. When you have a couple of kids running around it would be nice to have this on in background hooked up to a projector.

 

[mikelove]

Looking forward to that. Will allow me to get out and about and listen to my lecture dialogues saving me lots of library time.

Any idea on an approximate release date?

Spring is what I've been saying lately, and I'm feeling reasonably good about it since almost all of the hard work for 2.3 is already done.

In relation to flashcards, I'd love to be able to automate the learning process as such. For example, if I've created a category based on a new chapter of our textbook and added all the new vocab. From here it would be nice to be able to press a play button and have the characters/definition appear and then show you the stroke order for the character (draw it out) before moving onto the next character. When you have a couple of kids running around it would be nice to have this on in background hooked up to a projector.

Very heavily requested feature, and one that should be coming in 2.4.

 

[character]

I know there's been some discussion of this before, but in the dictionaries you can format (such as PLC) I'd like to see the definitions grouped at top, with links to jump to example sentences below instead of the definitions/example sentences being intertwined, and having to scroll to find a relevant definition. I think this would fit the 'lookup' model of a dictionary search better (i.e., I found an unknown word; let me look at the definitions so I can pick one that fits and get back to my material).

 

[goldyn chyld]

A random thought: I was thinking it would perhaps look better if the main entry and its trad/simp form in the brackets were separated, i.e. 汉学 [漢學] instead of 汉学[漢學]...

 

[mikelove]

I know there's been some discussion of this before, but in the dictionaries you can format (such as PLC) I'd like to see the definitions grouped at top, with links to jump to example sentences below instead of the definitions/example sentences being intertwined, and having to scroll to find a relevant definition. I think this would fit the 'lookup' model of a dictionary search better (i.e., I found an unknown word; let me look at the definitions so I can pick one that fits and get back to my material).

Interesting idea, but I'd more inclined to do this with some sort of "collapsible examples" type thing - show definitions without examples, tap on a definition to view its examples. That saves us from having too big a gap in how entries are formatted between dictionaries, plus it makes it easier to make this optional since all we're doing is hiding stuff rather than rearranging it.

A random thought: I was thinking it would perhaps look better if the main entry and its trad/simp form in the brackets were separated, i.e. 汉学 [漢學] instead of 汉学[漢學]...

Indeed it might, just have to see how many other bits of code we'd need to change to accommodate that extra space (a lot of parts of Pleco depend on that format) - thanks.

 

[mikelove]

Promising sign for iOS getting the same free online voice recognition support that Android has:

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/02/08...nese-and-russian-languages-coming-next-month/

 

[WangYuHong]

I'm mostly looking forward to turning Pleco into my book reader.

The font is one issue for me (just responded to that poll), but the other is trying to figure out some sort of formatting that I can control...
Maybe what I want is already in the system, and I just haven't done the right settings yet.

Basically, I like how iBook looks... (Although obviously I'm only reading English books in that thing)
* The font is a little relaxing (the default Pleco font looks really blocky to me and makes it hard for me to read a long passage continuously...)
* The formatting of the text is done pretty well... ( I realize that this is likely a per-book basis, but trying to read txt files in Pleco just doesn't fele the same)
* Seeing a "page" of text and flipping to the next page feels natural... (I blame this on the small iPhone screen... I'm eagerly awaiting the new iPad to come out)

What file format would give the best result in Pleco? (Or better yet, what's supported that gives me some control over the font and formatting?)

I start with a basic .txt file
In Word, I can add some nice formatting (even throw in a book cover) and make it a .docx file
It's trivial to turn that into a .pdf file
Less trivial, but still possible with free extensions, to turn it into an .epub file...

But from my reading so far, .pdf and .epub aren't supported yet...
(I just did a quick test of Word 2010's output formats: .DOCX, .PDF, .HTM, .XML, .MHT, .XPS
.DOCX, .PDF, and .HTM all open with decent formatting (the font is stil Pleco font... but it's still a step in the right direction), but I can't select any text for look-up... I'm not sure why that's the case, since I can manually copy some of the text (works in .docx, .pdf, and .htm that I tried), exit out of the book, go to the pasteboard reader and look-up definitions that way. It doesn't seem like it needs OCR at this point (although I can see that maybe needing to be the case for PDFs that are scans of books and don't include actual text).

So, I guess my feature request (which should last me for quite some time) is just 2 things:
1. Additional font support (already in the works, from what it sounds like... any idea on a release timeframe? 2.2.X? 2.3? Hopefully not 2.4 or beyond...
2. Looking up text (which I define as things I can hover-select (using standard iOS 'select' method) and copy to the pasteboard reader) without having to jump out to the pasteboard reader would be greatly appreciated as well.

The other niceties of iBook (simulated bookshelf, simulated page flips, etc.) are also appreciated, but maybe on that 2.X release where you magically have time to do everything on your wish list.

 

[mikelove]

Basically, I like how iBook looks... (Although obviously I'm only reading English books in that thing)
* The font is a little relaxing (the default Pleco font looks really blocky to me and makes it hard for me to read a long passage continuously...)
* The formatting of the text is done pretty well... ( I realize that this is likely a per-book basis, but trying to read txt files in Pleco just doesn't fele the same)
* Seeing a "page" of text and flipping to the next page feels natural... (I blame this on the small iPhone screen... I'm eagerly awaiting the new iPad to come out)

iBooks 2 has gorgeous fonts, in fact it's what inspired me to start thinking more about how we handle type in Pleco - also the combination of those and the new night mode got me to switch to it from Kindle as my regular ebook reader.

Anyway, #1 is being dealt with as you mention. #2 would really only improve if we add EPUB support, but that's one of our highest priority to-dos for the reader (along with search, text-to-speech, document-specific glossary files, and linking it up to OCR for PDF reading).

(I just did a quick test of Word 2010's output formats: .DOCX, .PDF, .HTM, .XML, .MHT, .XPS
.DOCX, .PDF, and .HTM all open with decent formatting (the font is stil Pleco font... but it's still a step in the right direction), but I can't select any text for look-up... I'm not sure why that's the case, since I can manually copy some of the text (works in .docx, .pdf, and .htm that I tried), exit out of the book, go to the pasteboard reader and look-up definitions that way. It doesn't seem like it needs OCR at this point (although I can see that maybe needing to be the case for PDFs that are scans of books and don't include actual text).

HTM will work (or should anyway) if you enable "Live Mode" in the Address Bar. Works best for shorter documents, though. DOCX we could theoretically support - unlike regular DOC files it's an open XML format and doesn't require extensive reverse-engineering to get at - but we wouldn't be able to render it very attractively since it's an insanely complicated format; the only realistic way for us to get it looking good is with Apple's renderer and the attendant need for tap-selection. You don't need to jump between apps, though, Pleco will happily open a DOCX file and let you look up text in it by tap-highlighting a block of it and pressing the [>] button to see it in a separate screen. PDF would require OCR though it's honestly not a great format for mobile document viewing anyway.

 

[WangYuHong]

I need to play with the settings more... I didn't even realize there was a setting for "live mode" (although it's not a simple toggle, it's based on the number of characters in the document). Doesn't work for my html file, though... Since I put a whole book's worth of text, changing the setting to "unlimited" (or even some really large value, I tried 20,000 with the same result) only crashes the Pleco program (yikes!). I'm guessing it does some sort of processing on the text and runs out of memory?

Anyway, I guess my question is why there isn't a "live mode" for documents other than html? (Is it a technical hurdle? Or just not extended to other file types?)
PDF and DOCX (I didn't try a regular DOC file) actually open in Pleco (as in, I can see the text inside the reader... images and formatting even show up as well).
I'm just unable to enable any sort of "live look-up" while in those documents to get definitions.

I agree EPUB (and the other features you mentioned) would go a long way towards "completing" the reader... But since I'm just taking txt files and trying to make them a bit more readable, I'm just focusing on usability first...

 

[mikelove]

I need to play with the settings more... I didn't even realize there was a setting for "live mode" (although it's not a simple toggle, it's based on the number of characters in the document). Doesn't work for my html file, though... Since I put a whole book's worth of text, changing the setting to "unlimited" (or even some really large value, I tried 20,000 with the same result) only crashes the Pleco program (yikes!). I'm guessing it does some sort of processing on the text and runs out of memory?

Yes, you'd want to chunk it up into smaller files. But that's a good idea anyway with such a long document - even without the extra memory burden of our system, you're stretching your luck putting an entire book in a single web page - the system has to keep the whole page and its structure loaded in memory at the same time.

Anyway, I guess my question is why there isn't a "live mode" for documents other than html? (Is it a technical hurdle? Or just not extended to other file types?)
PDF and DOCX (I didn't try a regular DOC file) actually open in Pleco (as in, I can see the text inside the reader... images and formatting even show up as well).
I'm just unable to enable any sort of "live look-up" while in those documents to get definitions.

"Live Mode" requires us to muck around with web pages' HTML/JavaScript code; with PDF and DOCX we don't have the ability to do that, we're just forwarding the file to Apple's built-in document viewer. It's better than refusing to open those documents altogether, and I really don't think the current interface is that bad for DOCs at least - it's just a few extra taps to highlight a word or a block of text and then one more tap on the [>] button to bring it up in a tap-lookup screen.