Multiple Custom Dictionaries

[sthubbar]

Of course thanks for the great product. I use it every day, especially the flashcard feature.

I am following the advice of alljapaneseallthetime.com and antimoon.com and changing my study focus to sentences. I have been entering them as custom dictionary items. I understand this goes beyond the design of Pleco and I have already experienced some glitches.

I'm thinking that creating multiple custom dictionaries can help alleviate the problems. I have already figured out I can rename the "PlecoDict User DB C-E" file and then multiple custom dictionaries will automatically show up in Pleco.

Here are my questions:

1) How do I change the display name of the custom dictionary within Pleco? Even though I rename the filename, in Pleco they all show up as "User C-E"
2) Are there any known issues with having multiple Custom Dictionaries?
3) Are there any known limitation on the size/# of entries in a Custom Dictionary?

Thanks for the awesome product.

 

[ipsi]

You'd actually be better off putting them in a text file and using MakePlecoDict to convert them to a custom dict. As far as I'm aware, you can't change the name once it's been set, though if you use MakePlecoDict you can choose a name (but not the icon) there.

 

[sthubbar]

OK. The problem with using MakePlecodict is that I am adding sentences at a rate of ~10-20 per day, and I study them as they are added. If I use MakePlecodict, I will have many small dictionaries of 10-20 entries, and seeing as my goal is to collect several thousand sentences, I would end up with several hundred small dictionaries.

I have another idea.

With dictionaries that have been created with MakePlecodict, is it possible to add entries to from within Pleco? So this idea is I can create some empty dictionaries (or have one entry) with MakePlecodict and change the dictionary name, and then add entries from within Pleco.

I'll check out this utility.

Thanks.

 

[ipsi]

I don't imagine that will work. As far as I'm aware, you can't add entries from within Pleco. .

That should be different in 2.0 (I believe).

I'm afraid I can't think of a way to do what you want in 1.0, maybe Mike will have a solution.

 

[mikelove]

There's no way to change the display name of user dictionaries in Pleco 1.0; we really didn't design the software to support multiple user dictionaries, it just happens to do so. Honestly if you're putting that much work into a user dictionary I'd recommend using ipsi's suggestion and putting the entries in a text file instead of storing them directly in Pleco; since the software isn't designed to juggle multiple dictionaries you really ought to have a backup of all of those entries in text format.

The size limit for entries is something very big - I think about 4k or so. The system can support up to 64,000 of them, though once it gets past a few thousand adding new entries starts to get really slow. And as ipsi says it's not possible to edit dictionaries created with MakePlecoDict.

In Pleco 2.0, we're switching to a newer and much more powerful system for storing user dictionary entries which would allow for almost unlimited size / numbers of entries and make adding them a lot faster, and should eventually offer a lot of the sorts of customizations you describe too.