Learn Writing Characters

[马克]

Pleco is an outstanding product, the best really. I'd like to see the ability to use the character and input display panes to also learn the strokes. Basically the way to learn is to copy. But as it is now, it is hard to have the character displayed in one pane, and perform some input in another pane. So I actually find myself displaying the character with another product on another device, then trying to learn the stroke order on Pleco drawing input. Ideally it should be possible to have them side by side. 可以吗？

Related to this, I have noticed that sometimes some of the very complex characters in my handwriting are recognized easily by Pleco, while some others, simpler others, sometimes are very difficult to recognize in my handwriting. I find this puzzling. I wonder if stroke order adherence could be dialed from loose to strict so that during non-learning use, the product could focus on efficiency of finding the character, while during a learning exercise, it could demand more accuracy from the user?

 

[mikelove]

That's actually been requested quite a few times - I think we'd probably just end up adding a tracing box over stroke order diagrams, does that make sense? Hard to find space for a drawing area + separate animation on anything less than an iPad.

Re handwriting, which specific characters give you trouble? Are you on iOS or Android (and if Android, do you have our "enhanced" handwriting recognizer?) No way for us to adjust the stroke order adherence at the moment - to be honest that would be rather tricky given how most handwriting recognition algorithms are designed.

 

[dcarpent]

While this wouldn't involve a change to Pleco, assuming Pleco plays nice on the new iPad and iPad Pro that has fully functional split screens, it should be possible to use half of the screen for Pleco stroke order diagrams or whatever and the other half for a whiteboard app or perhaps--much nicer--the Zen Brush app (which I suspect, with the new Apple Pencil on the iPad Pro, will get pretty close to simulating actual brush calligraphy).

 

[mikelove]

We could do that on a regular iPad too, but I think we'd probably try the overlay approach first since it works on iPhone as well - if that proved popular we might then add a split screen mode for iPad users, but better to start with the most universal solution.

With the iPad Pro, while we'll certainly get one here for testing we'll have to see some strong usage numbers before we commit a lot of time to optimizing around it.

 

[DonCachopo]

That's actually been requested quite a few times - I think we'd probably just end up adding a tracing box over stroke order diagrams, does that make sense? Hard to find space for a drawing area + separate animation on anything less than an iPad.

If the correct characters could be showed together with the strokes we drawn would be great

 

[mikelove]

The idea there was that you'd be drawing on a transparent overlay - following along with the strokes underneath - so I'm not quite sure if I see the point to replaying them too; would the order ever be wrong in that case?