caesartg said:
Under the "Category" select, also include a label "Scorefile" followed with the name of the currently viewed scorefile. Then underneath or beside this, two buttons "<<" ">>" that can be used to navigate to another scorefile, or another selecter similar to the 'Category' select (useful if someone has a LOT of scorefiles I guess).
We've actually had the same request on Android a few times now - this one at least should be in 2.3 (though improvements to the actual statistics presented won't happen until 2.4).
caesartg said:
However, I was wondering, could you not use the defined 'cards learned' scorefile measure to identify which single characters (or potentially also multichar vocab) have been learned, then colour these (or colour the exclusives) in a piece of text? Maybe it's too tied in with how I specifically use Pleco and wouldn't be useful for the majority of users. However, I do think character-based study is inherently useful and being able to look at a document and quickly see which characters I still need to focus on would be a wonderful feature.
With single characters it might be doable, but most people learn in a word-based way and for that we'd need a better text segmentation algorithm, so that if we run into, say, the string 的确实 we know whether you want 的确 + 实 or 的 + 确实. Though that particular example affects single characters too - don't know how the 的 is pronounced otherwise. We've actually found one good one but it's written in Java and so only usable on Android; we're trying to license a C-based one from somebody in China but it's taking a long time to get through to the people who control the source code.
gabor said:
ABC and Pleco dictionaries both have the ability to display character variations, however I could not find a way to enter such variations into my own entries. These are displayed by slashes, in Wenlin you can create such entries easily by adding slashes between the variations:
托/讬[-/託]
Please add this feature to user dictionaries!
We're actually getting rid of those in ABC (and PLC, though it only uses them for single characters and primarily only traditional ones). They're kind of an ABC-specific quirk, relating to John DeFrancis' desire to get everyone to view a "word" as a combination of pronunciation + meaning rather than a specific set of characters; unfortunately, though, this approach is not shared by any other major dictionaries or by many textbooks / teachers / standardized tests / etc; most other dictionaries handle these situations by creating two separate entries and having one point back to the other.
Accommodating variants creates a lot of problems - flashcard duplicate checking, for example, and viewing a particular definition in alternate dictionaries; one dictionary may skip a particular variant, or may treat it as a separate entry with a slightly different meaning. (editors don't always agree on which characters are variants and which are entirely separate) It makes sense for Wenlin to use them because that's their only dictionary and they don't have to worry about matching up with other data sets, but for us they've never been a great fit and now that we're adding so many more dictionaries and doing more merging of data between them they've become a pretty major headache.
So now the variants will all have separate entries; however, the definitions they link to will show up inline (so no dealing with "variant of" hyperlinks) and we plan to continue listing all of the variants when you view the full entry so that you can still get that info from the dictionaries that provide it. (i.e. you'll still be able to see that ABC considers 托/讬 to be variants of each other even though other dictionaries might not) But after we've had the system for that stabilized for a few releases, we'll probably add a way to create user dictionary entries that likewise seamlessly link to other entries.
