More bugs

[Anonymous]

I just installed PlecoDict v 1.0 for PPC. Not sure if it's just my device but here are a couple of issues I discovered. I'm using a Qtek 9100 WM5 device.

1. Installation from Windows failed. The cab files did, however, show up on my SD card so I was able to install it manually from there.

2. Whenever I search for English words or words using pinyin, I can only enter 6 letters in the search field. They seem to appear in a large font with a space between all the characters. For example, if I search for "Christmas", I can only type in "C h r i s t" and then can't type anything else in.

3. When I use the handwriting recognition to recognize Chinese characters, PlecoDict often crashes. This often happens when I click on 笔 and set it to "right, left, or bottom". PD will crash almost everytime I minimize the handwriting recognition when I want to write the character on the entire screen.

 

[mikelove]

1. Could you be a little more specific about this? How did it fail? What kind of error message did it give you?

2. Check the "Characters" section of Preferences - which Chinese font is selected? If it's SimSun, try switching to NSimSun - that should make English characters appear normal-sized.

3. Did you do anything strange with your installation, such as moving the handwriting recognition data file from main memory to a storage card? The recognizer can often crash on WM5 if it's installed to a storage card, which is why in 1.0 we automatically install it to main memory. If you just installed using the .cabs and didn't move any of the data files around afterwards, the recognizer should be where it's supposed to be.

What does the crash look like? Does it give you an error message or does it just quietly exit? Did you have any issues like this with Beta 3? (the recognizer code is pretty much unchanged since that release, so it would be pretty strange if this had newly appeared in 1.0) Does it happen right after you minimize the recognizer palette, or once you start writing, or after you finish writing and press the recognize button?

 

[Anonymous]

1. I forgot what the exact error was but I remember getting a message on my PPC screen saying that my installation of a certain dictionary was unsuccessful. After I clicked on OK, it did not proceed to install the other cab files. So, I went into File Explorer, went into the Storage Card folder, and clicked on all the cab files manually. They all installed fine. I selected "Storage Card" as the destination directory for all of these installs.

2. The only Chinese font available under Preferences is "UniSun". This might have something to do with the weird installation.

3. I didn't move anything around during the installation, but as I mentioned above, the installation did not go smoothly. Whenever I had a choice, I selected "Storage Card" as the destination directory.

When the program crashes, it quietly exits the program. I was never able to get Beta 3 working on my device.

The program crashes when:
a) If I open the recognizer, then write a character, click on the recognize button, click on a recognized character, then click on the minimize button
b) If I open the recognizer, immediately minimize the recognizer, write a character on the screen, then click on the recognize button (will crash when I click on the recognize button)

 

[mikelove]

1. Hmm... maybe your Pocket PC was running out of space in internal memory. Or something along those lines. Anyway the "manual install" option should work well in these cases, or clicking on the .cabs as you've done.

2. It certainly might - you'd be much better off using our included SimSun font. Download the full-version font file installer from My Orders and install one of the SimSun fonts from there; then, select NSimSun in the Characters panel of Preferences and English letters should look normal again.

3. I'm not seeing this on any systems here, so it's not going to be easy to reproduce - how is your Qtek doing as far as free memory? And what happened when you tried to use Beta 3? What sorts of errors did you encounter with that?

 

[Anonymous]

1. OK, I just deleted all the PlecoDict-related files manually and did a manual reinstall.

2. This issue was fixed by the manual install.

3. However, PD is still crashing everytime I minimize the handwriting recognizer. It works fine if I don't minimize the recognizer. Is there any way of removing the minimize icon from the handwriting recognizer. PD will crash if I accidentally click on it.

As for free memory:

Storage:
Total - 47.46 MB
In use - 33.70 MB
Free - 13.77 MB

Program:
Total - 49.97 MB
In use - 25.47 MB
Free - 24.50 MB

Over 300 MB free on Storage Card.

As for the Beta 3 problems, I'll just forward you the email trail we had going back and forth.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for forwarding that e-mail trail - sorry for not remembering it originally but I couldn't match it up from your forum name. The Beta 3 issues were likely related to the same out-of-memory problem that caused the automated install to fail in 1.0.

Glad to hear that #1 and #2 are fixed - we should make more prominent mention of the manual install on the download page (and possibly also check available memory more carefully in PlecoCheck and recommend a manual install if there are likely to be problems with the automated one)

On #3, this should certainly be enough memory for anything PlecoDict might need (it rarely goes above 3 MB or so) so that wouldn't explain the crash. I'm afraid there's no way to remove that minimize icon. Is anyone else out there experiencing this problem? We don't seem to have any reports of it, and it's never come up in our testing... do you have any add-on input methods installed on your Pocket PC? Another Chinese handwriting recognizer, or a regular Chinese input system, or an input system for some other language like Japanese? Any other software that hacks the operating system or adds some sort of extra functionality to other programs? (like an application launcher, or something that adds an icon to the taskbar)

 

[Anonymous]

I've got the release version of CE-Star installed on my device. I wonder if that's interfering with PD. But I only activate CE-Star when I need to write anything in Chinese. Otherwise, I don't even bother launching it.

On my Today screen, I've got Worldmate and the Resco Explorer software.

I just tried uninstalling CE-Star and it still crashes when I minimize the handwriting recognition.

Are there any registry settings I should delete? Maybe remnants of older versions of PD?

 

[mikelove]

It's unlikely that the previous versions would have left behind any registry settings, but you can certainly try deleting the keys - they're in HKLM/Software/Pleco Software/PlecoDict. They can all be safely deleted, but if you delete Registration or RegistrationVersion you'll have to reinstall your keyfile to get the software to unlock again.

As for CE-Star, I think some versions of that actually include the same handwriting recognition engine that we use, so it's possible that that might have caused some instability if their engine was loaded at the same time as ours. It's pretty unlikely, though, the engine is very well designed and I can't imagine the programmers would have left such a huge potential conflict.

The next thing I would suggest (assuming the registry stuff doesn't work) is to make sure you've deleted all remnants of CE-Star from your system (soft reset and see if you can find any files left behind in Windows or Program Files), just so that we can completely eliminate that as a source of conflicts. Also, just to double-check, when you manually installed PlecoDict, did you make sure to put the font files and handwriting recognizer library in main memory (and not on your storage card)? If not, use Resco to move PlecoHWR.dll and all of the .ttf/.ttc files from the storage card PlecoDict folder to \\Program Files\PlecoDict.

 

[Anonymous]

Yes, I made sure I completely removed CE-Star. I wasn't able to find any remnants of it. PD is still crashing. Might require a hard reset...

And yes, I made sure to put the PD font files on the main memory.

I don't know if it would help if I emailed you a list of all the software on my device.

My responses might not be as quick for the next week or so.

 

[mikelove]

If you don't mind, it certainly might help to e-mail us that list, though I'm still not sure what sort of bug could be causing this...

But just to double-check, you installed the handwriting recognizer to main memory as well, correct? PlecoHWR.dll? If it's not showing up in PlecoDict's installation folder, go into Resco's Options screen (accessible through the File menu), select the Browser tab and tap the "Show all files" button - that should let you see the file. On Windows Mobile 5 especially there's the potential for bugs if the recognizer is installed on a storage card instead of in main memory.

 

[Anonymous]

Mike, just an update on my PD installation. I did a hard reset on my Qtek 9100 today and installed PlecoDict first. Everything works fine except that handwriting bug that crashes PD still happens.

I did a manual install and even formatted my mini-SD card before installing anything.

Thanks.

 

[mikelove]

Hmm... well this definitely sounds like a hardware issue with the Qtek then. Which means we won't be able to fix it until we get one of them in here ourselves. Which I'd rather not do until we get at least one other report of this problem... Has anyone else with a Qtek 9100 (or another HTC Wizard derivative) had problems with the handwriting recognizer crashing?

 

[i4edge]

reconizer causes Pleco to crash

I've had a similar problem on my PPC6700 and Pleco v1. I followed the directions and got the manual install to work. Everything I have used works great, but noticed a glitch. If I am using the WM5 transcriber and then I turn on the Pleco character recognizer and try to use it, it will crash. My guess is that the programs don't know which to use. Perhaps Pleco can do a check to see if the transcriber input is selected and if so turn it off while the character recognizer is being used and turn it back on afterwards. Or either be able to recognizer characters written using the built in transcriber.

 

[mikelove]

We think we have a fix for rt's problem now - I've e-mailed it to him privately and if it does turn out to fix this I'll post an update about it here.

i4edge: we tested this and it actually looks like an issue with the Microsoft HTML control that we use to render dictionary entries; basically, because of the way that Transcriber enters text, if it enters a string of gibberish (which it does when you enter a Chinese character and it attempts to turn it into Engilsh) that causes PlecoDict to rapidly cycle through a bunch of different dictionary definitions; the HTML control can't keep up with it and eventually crashes, bringing down the rest of PlecoDict with it.

Fortunately, there's a simple workaround for this built into PlecoDict; go into the Search panel of Preferences and check the "Delay 1/4 secs before search" checkbox; leave it on the 1/4 second setting, that's more than enough for this. With that option enabled, PlecoDict will wait until the entire text string has been entered before it tries to update the definition, and that should prevent it from crashing. In light of this new bug it seems like it might make sense to enable this option by default in 1.0.1 - the 1/4 second delay is barely noticeable, but it should be enough to prevent any Transcriber-related mishaps.

 

[Anonymous]

Font problem

I have a Qteq 9100 and can not install the pleco dict. The fonts will not be innstalled. I have CE-star version 2,8 installed on my phone. This might be the problem.

I need the CE-star in order to write and read chinese on my phone.

Do somebody know how to solve this problem.

PW

 

[mikelove]

Could you be a little more specific about the font problem? Are you sure the fonts aren't installed? What happens when you try to run PlecoDict? We've tested our software with CE-Star on Windows Mobile 5 and we haven't found any serious problems. Have you gone into PlecoDict's "Characters" Preferences panel and tried to select a different font in there?

 

[caesartg]

I wouldn't have mentioned this as it's not a big thing at all, but I keep noticing it and it's a little annoying -

The write a character on the screen option interferes with at least one other function - when I have the option for writing a character on the screen turned on (the green circle with 'ON') and then go to manage lists and select 'New List', I can't write the new list's name on the screen. I then always go back to the main screen and switch the option for writing a character on the screen off (red circle with 'OFF') and go back, then I can now write the new flashcard list's name on the screen.

I have a T3 and I usually have it closed shut in small mode, hence I write on the screen more often and I either have to switch the write on screen option off, or open up my T3.

Hope you know what I'm talking about and can reproduce it.

Cheers

Ben

 

[mikelove]

We're aware of the problem, but unfortunately it's not that easy to fix - the interface for enabling/disabling the T3's built-in screen writing system is rather finicky and it would actually take a significant amount of work to reliably re-enable the writing feature when you leave the main screen and restore it again when you return. We can certainly fix this in the next major update but it's beyond the scope of what we're doing in 1.0.3.

However, there is an easy workaround - just tap the screen writing trigger button in your T3's toolbar twice and that should allow you to write the list name. When you get back to PlecoDict's main screen, tap twice on the ON/OFF toggle button and that should enable character writing again.

 

[Ma Guo Tou]

Qtek 9100

I also have a Qtek 9100, and I use C-E Star, but I haven't had any problems with pleco crashing on handwriting recongition. It must be an installation problem