on categories

[amsinams]

In 4.0beta there appears to be more potential for adding characters to categories for later flashcard use. I use flashcards a lot this way as it helps me learn, and handling/assigning of categories has been greatly improved.

Recently I found when reading a document/book you can override the default category of that book; this is most excellent, since when you click the + sign, in one swoop the character is added to that configured category.

However if you have forgotten that you have already done that for that character in that book, when clicking the boxed+ you get prompted if you want to add a different category: I agree this could also be useful.

But it would be cool if you can signal to the user that a character has already been added to the default category for that book, maybe a different color or makeup of the +. This prevents me clicking and finding out I already added it before.

Or a different sign on this row altogether, that allows you to toggle add/remove to the default/configured category (I realise that a ton of such shortcuts prevents a clean and clear view, so probably not.)

The other thing is when searching for a character and the dictionary entry is displayed, it would help if you can directly can see or can click on a button to verify to which categories this has been added; right now I use the + sign to add a card and when the + sign is boxed I find out which categories it belongs to, this to me compared to 3.x version is already much better. But perhaps there is a quicker way to find out what categories a character belongs to? I could be missing something.

In addition, the option "Add Category" s always greyed-out in this "Duplicate Card" window., it seems a shortcut to adding a category, but it is not clear to me under what circumstances this works, thus far I treated as work in progress but quite possibly I'm doing this all wrong.

thanks

 

[mikelove]

Sorry, for the first item, you've selected a default category for the book and you select a word that's in that category and it does not show the [+]? It should be treating that as the default category and ignoring the system one - we played with a lot of ideas for this and ended up concluding that two different default categories for words would be too confusing any way we sliced it (though we do let you have a separate default category for sentences if you're using our new sentence bookmarking option).

For seeing which categories a word is in: the easiest way to do that is with category tags, but there's also an option nobody seems to have found yet if you customize the definition screen layout (definition screen / tab configuration -> custom / Chinese tab order) where you can add a 'flashcards' section which will give you a helpful little box with a list of a word's flashcard categories and statistics. (you can also only show one or the other and can limit the profiles for the statistics part)

"Add category" should toggle the card into / out of whatever your default category is; you can make other category changes in card info.

 

[amsinams]

Excuse the delay, up till your response, basically I have been doing a lot of reading without using a default category, didn't even know this existed really.

Once you start reading and you set whatever you read to a default category (pleco add-on book, pdf, webpage), it makes a lot of sense; I then see 3 options of the+ sign:
- a bare plus sign: not added to any category
- a plus sign surrounded by a dashed line: added to some category but not the default category
- a boxed plus sign: added to the default category

So that is exactly what I was looking for: a way to identify the status of a word/character with respect to a category.
And of course now the greyed-out "duplicate card/add category" option makes sense as it relates to the default-category or per-document category when appropriately set; and this changes to "remove category" when it has already been added.

One thing that I notice though, when I read a pleco add-on book or other documents, I can set per that document a category, so it does not appear to change the 'default category'.
This doesn't work for webpages (I put short documents in my notes app and publish these as webpages, which I then consume via pleco):
with webpages only the default-category works. I realize webpages can be much more dynamic or ephemeral, but OTOH when you are able to store a webpage as a bookmark, like Pleco allows, why not also allow to set a category for such static links?

Thanks also for the pointer to the option nobody seems to have found (customize the definition screen layout), very useful.