MakePlecoDict and vista

[dom]

so i finally got access to a windows machine, and i decided to try using MakePlecoDict... unfortunately it kept crashing, making a 0 KB (empty) file before windows complained that it had stopped executing. this happened with a simple one-line file, and with the supplied sample.txt as well.

am i missing something? i'm running the program out the "Documents" folder on Vista, using an admin account. i've been meaning to try this for years, and now that i've gotten around to it i'm sad it's not working...

 

[mikelove]

We've never actually tried MakePlecoDict on Vista (in fact we don't even have a system running Vista at the moment, though I suppose we'll have to get one for desktop-version development at some point), so I don't know whether or not MakePlecoDict is Vista-compatible, but this sounds like it might just be a configuration problem - are you sure you used the correct set of options when you tried to encode sample.txt? Which options did you use?

 

[dom]

Which options did you use?

input file name: sample.txt
output: sample.pdb
dict name: sample

then 1 for Chinese-to-English

then the program hangs...

 

[mikelove]

That seems like it should work - did you change sample.txt at all? Anyone else tried MakePlecoDict under Vista yet?

 

[dom]

Well, I gave up on the Vista machine and found a Windows 2000 machine, which worked just fine... One final question, though... How do you get the line breaks in the definition? (e.g. the Unihan add-on has each item on a separate line, including the first line, but when i compile mine it all flows together...)

 

[mikelove]

You have to insert a special private-use Unicode character for those, 0xEAB1; it'll likely be invisible on your browser but I'll put one between two brackets here in case it's not: (). A good Unicode text editor should be able to insert an arbitrary symbol like that if you type in the hex code.

 

[ipsi]

It actually appears to be a Chinese or Japanese Character... Though that could just be because Firefox is thinking it's a non-unicode character?

 

[frances]

On my machine it appears to be a character composed of 間 on the left and 鳥 on the right. If it's not an officially defined character I guess that just means that I have a font installed that is using that code?

I guess it could be intended as a variant of 鷳? This isn't a character I've seen before, but I just found it in Pleco.

 

[mikelove]

It comes up as a simple ? on my copy of Firefox; every application seems to differ in how it handles private-use Unicode characters, there isn't any officially-defined way to render them. Sometimes it'll just come up with whatever character the system drew last, sometimes it'll pick one semi-randomly, and sometimes it will be completely invisible/blank. Word '07 sensibly draws it as a question mark with a box around it. But anyway, if you paste it into a Unicode text editor it should act like a line break in MakePlecoDict.