MakePlecoDict

[Anonymous]

text formatting in definition

Is it possible to do text formatting, like bold, italics etc, in the definition of an entry with MakePlecoDict?

Also, if I create an entry in the user dictionary via flash cards importing, any unicode pinyin in the definition automatically gets converted into pinyin with numbers. I mean, like "p?nyīn" automatically gets converted into "pin4yin1". Any way to prevent this?

 

[mikelove]

We don't currently support bold text in MakePlecoDict. (italic text isn't even supported by our font files)

And I'm afraid there's no way to prevent the tone marks from being converted to tone numbers, but if we come up with a workaround we'll certainly put it in.

 

[herve]

Hi all,
I finally tried MakePlecoDict, and after a few attempts, it finally works...!
Here are some comments :

1 ) don't be surpsise not having the result within seconds: it is "quite slow", but this comment is totaly my own feeling ;-)

2 ) it requires virtual memory that went over my PC configuration. I finally decided to launch it without any other program: i) I did not want to make long testing to understand what works and what does not; ii) I do not run MakePlecoDict every minute, so it is not a big problem: just be aware of that!

3 ) I was quite happy to find my french characters, with accents. This will allow me to build a proper chineese/french dictionary.

4 )

How do I get the superscript numbers? Are they ordinary UNICODE characters?
How do I get the circled numbers? Again, UNICODE?

Yes on both counts, you can use the standard Unicode values for those.

Stupid question probably : how can I do that / where can I find codes ? (I am using either MSWord or WordPad to edit my dictionnary)

5 )

If you enter the entry in traditional characters only it'll work just as well; the brackets are only required if you want to specify both the simplified and the traditional characters. PlecoDict's search engine doesn't care whether the dictionary is in traditional or simplified mode, it'll look for characters in either version of a headword in both modes.

Well! I use NJStar Communicator, with the simplified characters input configuration. I noticed that when I switch between traditional and simplified in PlecoDict, characters inside the definition change accordingly, but the character in the word itself (1st column of my txt file) remains simplified.

6 ) Will there be at some time tha ability to translate pinyin in the definitions (MakePlecoDict keeps the tone numbers).

 

[mikelove]

1-2) Yeah, we were pretty lazy in designing MakePlecoDict and hard-coded the memory allocation around the ABC dictionary (with its 200,000 entries) - not a problem on our development workstations with 2 GB of RAM, but on a "normal" PC it dips heavily into virtual memory and hence can be very slow.

3) Thanks! The nice thing about using Unicode is that it's easy for us to support all of these.

4) Choose "Symbol" from the "Insert" menu in Word, and make sure to choose a Unicode-friendly font like Arial Unicode. (if it's not listed, go to the Word installer and make sure you install the "Universal Font" file)

5) Yes, that's deliberate - headwords need to be coded in manually.

6) Eventually, but we're probably not going to make any serious upgrades to MakePlecoDict until 2006 (when we're planning to release a full-fledged desktop dictionary and flashcard editor), so it might have to wait until then.

Honestly, given the level of interest in the Pocket PC release I think aside from the 1.0.2 bug-fix update on Palm it's unlikely we're going to be doing very much work on anything until the Pocket PC version is ready.

 

[aoliege]

Hi Mike,
Thanks a lot for this beautiful piece of work.

I have two question concerning MakePlecoDict
1) Do the Unicode fonts used in the PlecoDict
support Cyrillic?
2) Is there any way to make "linebreaks" and
"bold font" in a user dictionary ('cause I saw
you did it in the Unihan dictionary)?

Thanks again

 

[Anonymous]

All this means that a new CEDICT should be released for us!

 

[mikelove]

aolige - on #1, the answer is no on Palm (and they wouldn't be very easy to add) but I believe yes on Pocket PC since they seem to be built into Microsoft's Tahoma font.

On #2, it's not officially supported (though then again neither is MakeDict itself) but if you have a Unicode text editor (like EmEditor) that supports custom characters you can use character hex code 0xEAB1 for newlines and codes 0xEAB2 and 0xEAB3 to enable/disable bold text. These are not official/standard codes and may change or disappear at any time, so don't count on this to work in future versions (but it would be pretty easy to find/replace them with any substitute codes we might offer).

Guest - as I've said a couple of times, we're planning to do that once we release the finished Pocket PC version. But we're not going to be doing it on a regular basis, at least not for a while.