iPhone Feature Requests

[stephshanghai]

It would be nice to have an "erase" swipe right kind of gesture to get rid of unwanted user dictionary entries or redundant flashcards.
I remapped a large flashcard file to my user dictionary and it ends up being a lengthy process to delete the duplicates (I have to go through several steps each time).
Another way would be to be able to sort the flashcards alphabetically and do the "edit" and select the unwanted ones. But, forgive me, Pleco is a beautiful app and so powerful, I may have missed it, I do not know how to do this sorting.
Also, I spend half of my time in China and the HWR extension is a real life saver. Now that I know how to write, it makes living in China and studying the language a real treat! Thanks a lot!

 

[mikelove]

It would be nice to have an "erase" swipe right kind of gesture to get rid of unwanted user dictionary entries or redundant flashcards.
I remapped a large flashcard file to my user dictionary and it ends up being a lengthy process to delete the duplicates (I have to go through several steps each time).

Did you try a flashcard "Search Cards" for "duplicate cards"? That should pick them up in flashcards at least. We've added a "Dictionary Browser" screen for the next update that should greatly streamline this process for user dictionaries too (let you scroll through and easily edit / select / delete entries).

Another way would be to be able to sort the flashcards alphabetically and do the "edit" and select the unwanted ones. But, forgive me, Pleco is a beautiful app and so powerful, I may have missed it, I do not know how to do this sorting.

You can do that in "Search Cards" too - search for cards in a particular category and sort the results in whatever order you like, you can then Edit and batch delete the ones you want to get rid of.

Also, I spend half of my time in China and the HWR extension is a real life saver. Now that I know how to write, it makes living in China and studying the language a real treat! Thanks a lot!

You're very welcome! Thanks for using our software.

 

[ian989]

Definition highlighting would be great. Chinese characters being what they are, I don't always remember which definition(s) I meant to study when a flashcard pops up or when I recheck a word/character. Since the PLC dict already has a number in a circle before each definition why not make that number a button. You tap the number and that specific definition becomes 'highlighted'. Just made to stand out in some way, and potentially floats to the top of the definition list. Tap the number again to restore the default. Think this could happen?

 

[mikelove]

Definition highlighting would be great. Chinese characters being what they are, I don't always remember which definition(s) I meant to study when a flashcard pops up or when I recheck a word/character. Since the PLC dict already has a number in a circle before each definition why not make that number a button. You tap the number and that specific definition becomes 'highlighted'. Just made to stand out in some way, and potentially floats to the top of the definition list. Tap the number again to restore the default. Think this could happen?

That one's actually rather tricky because then we have to keep track of those numbers between dictionary revisions or risk screwing up your notes - we could certainly look at making the process of copying a subset of a dictionary entry to serve as a custom flashcard easier, though. (if you're not aware of that feature now: go into Organize Cards, select a card you want to do this to, tap "Convert to custom card," then edit the definition to limit it to whatever portion of the entry you want)

 

[alanmd]

Merged dictionary entry display

Hi, after hearing about the idea of merged multi-dictionary search a long time ago, I got to try it out recently on Android, and it didn't work quite in the way I expected. The search worked as I thought it would, but I was surprised that viewing the dictionary entry still required me to peck at the change dictionary button to see the results from all of the different dictionaries.

In my opinion this pecking to see if any other results are there is the worst thing about using Pleco, so my feature request is to show a merged dictionary entry when using the merged dictionary search. By having entries from multiple dictionaries on the same screen, I can see that there is more to read and just scroll down to read it. I can also compare the opinions of different dictionaries on screen at the same time.

For example, when merged multi dictionary search is selected, I think it would be great if the dictionary entry looked something like this （with the ordering being my preferred dictionary ordering)

你好
nǐ hǎo

ABC
INTJ. How are you? Hello.

CC
* Hello!
* Hi!
* How are you?

OX
[used as a greeting] how do you do, how are you

PLC
how are you; hello (a common form of greeting, used at any time of the day [...]

[...]

I can see why it might be useful to sometimes search through and see results from a single dictionary still, so this would basically appear as another dictionary in my list, the way it does from the search screen.

Does this idea make sense?

 

[mikelove]

Hi, after hearing about the idea of merged multi-dictionary search a long time ago, I got to try it out recently on Android, and it didn't work quite in the way I expected. The search worked as I thought it would, but I was surprised that viewing the dictionary entry still required me to peck at the change dictionary button to see the results from all of the different dictionaries.

In my opinion this pecking to see if any other results are there is the worst thing about using Pleco, so my feature request is to show a merged dictionary entry when using the merged dictionary search. By having entries from multiple dictionaries on the same screen, I can see that there is more to read and just scroll down to read it. I can also compare the opinions of different dictionaries on screen at the same time.

We do gray out the button if there aren't any other dictionaries with results, and you can see a list of all of the dictionaries with results by tap-holding on the button, but it should actually work more like the way you describe on iOS (I say "should" because we're not 100% confident that we won't find a problem in our code for this that forces us to punt it to a later release). On Android it's trickier because we don't have our own text display system and instead rely on the built-in Android one, which means that there's not really a good way for us to show you 10 pages worth of text without making the screen load very slowly while it word-wraps all of that, but on iOS we do have our own text system and so can do all sorts of behind-the-scenes-optimizations to make word wrapping fast enough.

One tricky thing about this, though, for which we don't have a good solution yet: how do users select a particular entry from this list to make into a flashcard? Right now we're going back and forth between putting a button at the top / bottom of each entry (but then how do users know which entry it's associated with?), putting them alongside each entry (but that means a lot of wasted blank space and narrower / harder-to-read text), or having some sort of subtle "selected" background for the specific entry you would potentially be adding to flashcards with the + button which you can change by tapping on a different entry.

 

[alanmd]

it should actually work more like the way you describe on iOS

Wow, great! Can't wait to see it in action...

One tricky thing about this, though, for which we don't have a good solution yet: how do users select a particular entry from this list to make into a flashcard?

Is it possible to add the whole multi-dictionary entry into the flashcard? Or maybe just the first dictionary in the list? If a user wants a flashcard from a specific dictionary, couldn't they just switch to that dictionary and then add the flashcard?

 

[mikelove]

Is it possible to add the whole multi-dictionary entry into the flashcard? Or maybe just the first dictionary in the list? If a user wants a flashcard from a specific dictionary, couldn't they just switch to that dictionary and then add the flashcard?

Adding multi-dictionary entries to flashcards is problematic for a bunch of reasons, chief among them that dictionaries often have slightly different traditional characters or Pinyin tones for a particular word which we nonetheless merge into a single result. We don't really want to start making flashcards with multiple versions of those because that would both complicate duplicate-checking and make fill-in-the-blanks / multi-choice tests a lot more confusing.

We could add the first entry, though, and in fact with the "selection" idea (currently my favorite) I think that would be the default behavior.

(for any fanti users worried about that first comment: we have ways to be reasonably confident that these are the same word when we merge them, and in any case we only do it for multi-character words - with a single character we group by your current character set, so if you're in fanti mode and you type in "li4" you'll get 曆 and 歷 as totally separate results; we even trim the definition in most cases, so that you'll only see the 'calendar' portion of it for 曆 even if the original dictionary covered 歷 in the same entry)

 

[character]

For flashcards, I was thinking it would be nice to have a way to review subsets of larger categories, not just new cards in the category. Combine this with Repeat Incorrect and Loop, and add in another subset once the user has correctly answered all the previous subset, and I think this would be a good feature. A user might retain more covering 10-20 cards this way than spending the same amount of time going through 50 cards a single time.

I'm sorry if I missed a way to set this up without a lot of manual splitting of categories and changing categories between flashcard sessions.

 

[mikelove]

For flashcards, I was thinking it would be nice to have a way to review subsets of larger categories, not just new cards in the category. Combine this with Repeat Incorrect and Loop, and add in another subset once the user has correctly answered all the previous subset, and I think this would be a good feature. A user might retain more covering 10-20 cards this way than spending the same amount of time going through 50 cards a single time.

That's what "limit # of unlearned" is designed for, actually - have you experimented with that setting?

 

[character]

That's what "limit # of unlearned" is designed for, actually - have you experimented with that setting?

I tried it after seeing your post. Set the value to 20 but the flashcard test went past that number of cards.

 

[mikelove]

I tried it after seeing your post. Set the value to 20 but the flashcard test went past that number of cards.

Only applies to "unlearned" cards - you can set the threshold for those on that screen. Or create a new blank scorefile if you'd like to start reviewing cards according to that system and not have your already-well-studied ones grandfathered in.

 

[j.luengo]

A valuable feature for the iPhone version would be a setting that would allow independent control of the font sizes from Chinese versus Latin characters. This would facilitate reading documents containing both English and Chinese text.
For example, in File Document Reader, a font size of 12 is already good to read English text, but Chinese characters, being so much more complex, require at least sizes 16 or 18. With these font sizes, Latin characters appear unnecessarily large, taking up a lot of valuable space from the small iPhone screen.
I don't know how feasible this would to implement

 

[mikelove]

A valuable feature for the iPhone version would be a setting that would allow independent control of the font sizes from Chinese versus Latin characters. This would facilitate reading documents containing both English and Chinese text.
For example, in File Document Reader, a font size of 12 is already good to read English text, but Chinese characters, being so much more complex, require at least sizes 16 or 18. With these font sizes, Latin characters appear unnecessarily large, taking up a lot of valuable space from the small iPhone screen.
I don't know how feasible this would to implement

It's a little tricky because mixing multiple font sizes on the same line doesn't work very well (lots of white space / awkward layout) - our new Chinese font should be more readable at small sizes than the iOS system one, though, so you may have a better chance of finding an acceptable balance with that.

 

[character]

Only applies to "unlearned" cards - you can set the threshold for those on that screen. Or create a new blank scorefile if you'd like to start reviewing cards according to that system and not have your already-well-studied ones grandfathered in.

Forgive me for not understanding, but would that still have problems if I finished one test and later started another test? I'm getting the impression I need to break up my categories into much smaller ones and manage which cards are available manually, while using repeat incorrect and loop for the retesting I want.

 

[mikelove]

Forgive me for not understanding, but would that still have problems if I finished one test and later started another test? I'm getting the impression I need to break up my categories into much smaller ones and manage which cards are available manually, while using repeat incorrect and loop for the retesting I want.

Not sure if I understand the question - what specific problems do you think would arise?

 

[character]

Not sure if I understand the question - what specific problems do you think would arise?

I'm concerned about which cards are shown being tied to previously seen vs unseen, instead of a simple randomization of the cards in the category. I guess I need to find the time to dig through the flashcards part of the manual again and try to see if I can get something close to what I want instead of hand splitting my categories.

 

[mikelove]

I'm concerned about which cards are shown being tied to previously seen vs unseen, instead of a simple randomization of the cards in the category. I guess I need to find the time to dig through the flashcards part of the manual again and try to see if I can get something close to what I want instead of hand splitting my categories.

This is done across multiple tests - there's a persistent "pool" of unlearned / learned cards to review. So you won't randomly get a whole new batch of cards with that learned / unlearned mix, you'll get the same ones over and over until you've learned them.

 

[johnh113]

A valuable feature for the iPhone version would be a setting that would allow independent control of the font sizes from Chinese versus Latin characters. This would facilitate reading documents containing both English and Chinese text.
For example, in File Document Reader, a font size of 12 is already good to read English text, but Chinese characters, being so much more complex, require at least sizes 16 or 18. With these font sizes, Latin characters appear unnecessarily large, taking up a lot of valuable space from the small iPhone screen.
I don't know how feasible this would to implement

It's a little tricky because mixing multiple font sizes on the same line doesn't work very well (lots of white space / awkward layout) - our new Chinese font should be more readable at small sizes than the iOS system one, though, so you may have a better chance of finding an acceptable balance with that.

Dear Mike,

As you know, I agree with j.luengo on this topic, as I've asked for the same thing several times. It may not look good, and it certainly shouldn't be the default, but for those of us that want to be able to read both the roman and the Chinese characters without making the Roman characters enormous would love this option, not just in the document reader, but everywhere we can set the font sizes.

John

 

[mikelove]

As you know, I agree with j.luengo on this topic, as I've asked for the same thing several times. It may not look good, and it certainly shouldn't be the default, but for those of us that want to be able to read both the roman and the Chinese characters without making the Roman characters enormous would love this option, not just in the document reader, but everywhere we can set the font sizes.

Understood, but we're hoping the new fonts will at least help matters a little in the meantime.