Move characters to input line?

Judy

秀才
I am probably missing something obvious, but I've been through the manual a few times and can't figure out how to do this. If I do a keyboard search and the results include a list of characters, can I choose the correct character and move it to the input line (so that I can do another search for the next character in the word I want)? This was very easy to do in the Palm OS version -- there was an icon with an upward arrow that would move a character (or indeed a pinyin string) from anywhere in the screen, or from the history panel, to the input line for searching.

I think the IPod/IPhone dictionary as a whole is dazzling; it's just going to take this old lady awhile to adjust after years of using my old friend on the Palm.

Many thanks!
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Thanks! It's a little awkward, but you can activate an option for this through Settings / Dictionary / Entry Commands / Search for headword; that will add a link to the end of each entry you can tap on to bring it up in the search field. (so basically two taps instead of one)

We'd love to come up with a more elegant approach for this, but we're not sure what it would be in portrait mode at least since there's no clear entry selection - do we add another button to the right (left?) of each entry, or do we just do this through a toolbar button once you've already selected / brought up an individual entry?
 

gato

状元
We'd love to come up with a more elegant approach for this, but we're not sure what it would be in portrait mode at least since there's no clear entry selection - do we add another button to the right (left?) of each entry, or do we just do this through a toolbar button once you've already selected / brought up an individual entry?
A pop-up window already comes up when you tap any character or word in the dictionary screen. I think you can use add a link next to the dictionary name in the pop-up window that will do a search on this character or word. The pop-up window already gives the definition of the selected character/word from the dictionary at the top of the dictionary list, but currently there seems to be no way to switch between dictionaries in this pop-up window. Adding a search link would make that doable. The user can also then modify the search word if needed: for example, to search for just a substring.

Here's a screen shot of the pop-window:
http://www.pleco.com/ipmanual/images/manual171548.png
 

Judy

秀才
Great, that works! Thank you. I think a toolbar button would be the best solution, especially if it could be engineered so that anything selected from the screen could be moved to the input line, as it was in the Palm OS.

Forgot to mention how brilliant I think the color-tone idea is. If only I had had something like that from the moment I started studying Chinese, so that the tone would be visually reinforced! I told my ex-Chinese teacher about it; he replied that he thinks that should now be required in all textbooks of beginning Chinese.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Thanks! Tone coloring seems to be getting pretty popular now, though there's still a lot of debate about which color for which tone is best - we've had at least half a dozen emails come in advocating for different coloring systems. Which is exactly why we make them customizable...
 
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