multiple character input

[crow610]

First of all, I want to say how wonderful this software is. After studying Chinese for 3 years and relying on the laborus task of looking up a character in the dictionary, I knew there had to be a quicker way. After a classmate showed me pleco on his PDA I immediately decided that I would buy a PDA just so I could have this greate piece of software. No more counting the radical strokes, looking it up, counting the rest of the strokes, looking it up..bla bla....
Chinese has become fun again.

So, after using pleco for about a week now I have a few suggestions on what could be added.

1) left handed character input (place character input box on left)
2) multiple character input

Thats all for now.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks! That's wonderful to hear, and exactly the reason why we're in this business.

As for your suggestions: #1 is already available, just enable the appropriate checkbox in the Input section of Preferences. (I'm a righty myself, but there are probably at least a dozen features in PlecoDict that far fewer than 1/7 of our customers are using)

On #2, I'm not quite sure what you mean - you can already do searches for multiple characters if you just go into the recognizer screen again. If you're referring to drawing multiple characters in the box at the same time, that would be nice but I'm afraid it's beyond the abilities of our handwriting recognition engine.

 

[crow610]

Yea for left handed input.

Without knowing how your handwriting recognition engine works, it seems like you could simply allow the user to select how many input boxes to display on the screen (where the number of boxes coresponds to the number of characters to input.) This method simply eliminates the need to click the 笔 character for every character that is inputed.

Adam

 

[mikelove]

Well yes, but then we'd need to make the boxes smaller than the current one, which might be problematic on some systems (like the Treo 650) with very small screens. And however we did it it would probably end up looking cramped. But I agree that the system does need to be streamlined - we already offer an option to automatically recognize after a certain amount of time has passed since you last lifted the pen (just like in most other Chinese handwriting recognizers), but we should probably also offer an option to automatically insert the first character match (and let you choose from a pop-up list of alternates to replace it if it's incorrect) - the new Hanwang recognizer is accurate enough to actually make that a useful option.

 

[Anonymous]

Multi-Charact Input

Many Chinese inputs allow for splitting the screen into 2-3 regions, and by entering a character into a second region confirms that the first recognized character for the one written in the first box is correct on automatically enters it. Does that run-on sentence make sense?

Also, a way to scroll through the recognized characters to see if there is a match beyond the first couple would make me feel like I was in heaven.

 

[mikelove]

We've thought about doing this, but given that people are never entering more than 2 or 3 characters at a time we're not sure how useful it would be - it's more helpful if you want to enter dozens of them at a time.

But I do think that there's something to be said for automatically entering the first recognized character, since our new Hanwang recognizer is accurate enough to make this a reasonable proposition. If you tapped on another one of the choices it would delete the first character and replace it with the one you tapped. Of course we would want to make this optional to avoid confusing people.

A scrolling option would be a little harder, there aren't generally that many more character choices available than the ones on the screen and in the collapsed/palette interface there's not a whole lot of room to add scroll arrows. (we'd have to shrink the number of character choices per page, which would make things worse in some cases).