Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thread

[mikelove]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

With the Pleco version just before the yesterday update, the bug (?) happened almost every time I used that profile. I just tried to reproduce it, but it took 4 times, then it happened again. I will send you the alogcat, but probably I made a mistake with that program (leaving without saving, then saving). But I am sure to reproduce and alogcat it again.

OK, we'll keep hammering at it and see if we can get anywhere.

I am no longer sure that Pleco lost most of the information - I had started the session before midnight, and restarted after Plecos termination after midnight, and then compared the number of cards to test - but after midnight those numbers cannot be compared, because the flashcards of the next day were added to the session.

Ah, that makes more sense - it's virtually impossible for Pleco to lose what you've done during a session since those test results are written out to your flashcard database instantly (so they'd only disappear if there was something wrong with your SD card's file system, basically).

It happened again. looks like if i have the drawing overlay open and rotate my phone it crashes.

Looks like this is the same as HW60's crashing bug, actually, so I think we've figured it out now - thanks.

during flashcard session (with BT headset) all previous problems seem to be gone! but had 2 or 3 cards where initial audio ended abruptly, on second play (by button) normal.
maybe my phone was busy somewhere else, so will continue to test...

Could be some sort of interruption like that, but it could also be something particular to the audio sample (happening to be the wrong size for your BT headset) - do you remember which words these were? Could also just be that something else was sending audio to your headset at the same time, or some sort of wireless interference in general.

tried to long-tap dict icon, selected full-text search all english dicts, but whatever searchterm (chinese char with or without wildcards) does return same list as full-text search all chinese dicts...

Ah, thanks, we rewrote a lot of that stuff and it seems like the long-tap menu isn't always doing its job here.

also, when i open reader with fresh clipboard, afterwards normal pleco icon again opens the reader with (stale) clipbord content

Wait, it's doing that from the regular application icon? That should never open the reader, it should take you back to your last place in the dictionary; are you sure it's not one of the shortcut launcher icons instead? (if you're using those, did you follow the instructions to delete and then re-create them?)

New TTS is noticeably faster on my ASUS TF101 tablet. That results in words that seem to overlap each other, and sounds very "jerky".

That's odd... we could add an option to slow it down, but actually we observed a lot more problems like that with the old system; it would tend to "stutter" in places where it was supposed to speak quickly. Did you not hear those problems before?

So, I'd say that the audio is quite a bit poorer in quality.

Also odd, everybody we tested here said they liked the new one better.

Unfortunately, I deleted the "Free Chinese TTS engine", per instructions, so I can't play them both.

Wouldn't be possible anyway as we took out the code library for the old one when we added the new one.

Ouch, the reader clipboard no longer works. If I select text and then tap on the clipboard icon, nothing is stored in the clipboard... However, I can "Copy full entry" and "Copy headword" (nice addition, btw) from the dictionary.

This is just when reading a text file, right?

 

[laurenth]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

This is just when reading a text file, right?

Yes.

 

[mfcb]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

also, when i open reader with fresh clipboard, afterwards normal pleco icon again opens the reader with (stale) clipbord content

Wait, it's doing that from the regular application icon? That should never open the reader, it should take you back to your last place in the dictionary; are you sure it's not one of the shortcut launcher icons instead? (if you're using those, did you follow the instructions to delete and then re-create them?)

deleted and recreated the shortcuts. still happening like that. guess it has to do with the setting "open reader if clipboard >4 char". if i disable that one, phenomenon is gone.

first i suspected the way how i got around the fact that the pleco shortcuts are not in the list of shortcuts of swipepad, but has nothing to do with that.
just tried fresh clipboard, opened reader shortcut, back out of reader, open app-icon or dict shortcut both lead to reader again. if i disable above setting, everything like expected.

about swipepad, i use "nova launcher" (dont like samsungs launcher), and swipepad shows an "activities" shortcut (same icon as the nova launcher...), there i scrolled down to pleco, and it has 6 activities to select from, one is the reader... so, my needs are perfectly met by that combination, select something in for instance QQ, use swipepad to directly launch reader, one time back to return to QQ. if i need the dict, of course i did not expect to enter reader again (with previous clipboard contents), but changing the setting to "open reader if clipboard never" seems a fair trade

 

[Wan]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

So, I'd say that the audio is quite a bit poorer in quality.

I second that. It’s a little too fast and sometimes seems to overlap. Also, you should make the TTS system handle the tilde symbol as an instance of the headword.

Other than that, some other bugs occurred, mostly cosmetic, no crashes (yet):
Sometimes on pressing a button, the image of the button is shown on the full screen (very large) instead of the button action.
Sometimes, upon pressing a button, the screen goes blank for a couple of seconds before showing what it’s supposed to show.
Dictionary search (be it pinyin or character input) is much slower than it was before. Sometimes it takes a whole second until the result list appears.

Overall, the changes seem to be mainly internal as I haven’t noticed (or used) many of the newly introduced features. Pleco is still very usable, but there are definitely more glitches than before the update, which probably is due to the rewriting of code.

Sorry, this is all very vague. I don’t see a pattern yet, but will tell you as soon as I do.

 

[mikelove]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

I second that. It’s a little too fast and sometimes seems to overlap.

Hmm... well we can certainly slow it down, or if people really hate it we can even go back to the old system (though to my ears at least it was much more warble-y and overlapped more).

Sometimes on pressing a button, the image of the button is shown on the full screen (very large) instead of the button action.

Which buttons are you referring to? With the keyboard it's normal (on some devices at least), but otherwise I'm not sure what would be causing this.

Sometimes, upon pressing a button, the screen goes blank for a couple of seconds before showing what it’s supposed to show.

Again, which buttons is this happening with?

Dictionary search (be it pinyin or character input) is much slower than it was before. Sometimes it takes a whole second until the result list appears.

That one's definitely news to us since it's designed to be faster (and is indeed faster on our test devices)... could you give me an example of a search that this happened with? Also, are you using a lot of user dictionaries? And is it showing you a "Working..." or other progress indicator while it searches, or just halting?

 

[mikelove]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

deleted and recreated the shortcuts. still happening like that. guess it has to do with the setting "open reader if clipboard >4 char". if i disable that one, phenomenon is gone.

Must be that, yes.

first i suspected the way how i got around the fact that the pleco shortcuts are not in the list of shortcuts of swipepad, but has nothing to do with that.
just tried fresh clipboard, opened reader shortcut, back out of reader, open app-icon or dict shortcut both lead to reader again. if i disable above setting, everything like expected.

OK, we'll do some more testing (with SwipePad) and see if things improve. Thanks.

 

[alex_hk90]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

Just installed 2.4.0 Beta 4a, on top of 2.4.0 Beta 3c (the last Beta 3 version).

I think I've enabled the Cantonese in the settings but I can't see anything new in the PLC dictionary - do I need to do some kind of restart to get it to show up?

Did you skip over the prompt to update the built-in data files? Go into Settings / General and you can reset it so that that prompt will appear again on the next startup.

Thanks - it works now. I don't think I skipped over the prompt but maybe I didn't notice. That or perhaps it might have been because I didn't have a data connection when I tried to open it? Not sure if that would've made any difference anyway.

Also, I'm not sure about the new E and C icons - while they make more sense than the light and dark coloured books, I don't feel that they look as nice.

True, but the books just didn't make any sense at all - couldn't even tell which dictionaries you were looking at. And compared to the old icons (with their horribly blocky font) I think this still looks a lot better, so for most users it won't be as negative a change.

I've just noticed that there are filled-in E and C icons (it seems for full-text search?) which does make them better.

 

[mikelove]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

I've just noticed that there are filled-in E and C icons (it seems for full-text search?) which does make them better.

Interesting... maybe we could reverse them, or use some other method to indicate full-text searches. Or even just not bother making the distinction but change our default abbreviations for full-text and other groups. (C# and E#, say)

 

[mikelove]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

Dictionary search (be it pinyin or character input) is much slower than it was before. Sometimes it takes a whole second until the result list appears.

Did some more investigating and I think I may have an idea about what's causing problems. Are you:

1) Using HanDeDict, Adso, or CFDICT (or all three), and/or
2) Searching for a single syllable (or the start of one)?

The versions of those three dictionaries on our server doesn't seem to be using our new faster indexing system, for some reason - we'll make sure that's fixed for the next beta - and there's also a bug that prevents our faster indexing system from kicking in in single-syllable searches even for dictionaries that do support it. So some combination of those things might be responsible for the performance issues you're having. (matters also aren't helped by Sony's apparently very stingy cache memory allocations)

 

[mfcb]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

today i had again the BT audio abruptly ending. as far as i could see, nothing else (like sync,virusscan,...) but pleco was running on the phone. words affected seem to be completely random, during review of "unknown" words my phone was searching a wlan (icon of some wlan available came up on status bar) but no problem playing audio, even on words that just before did not finish. when pushing the play audio button, it (up to now) always plays it fully.

it seems, that it affects words where there is a full recording. even some single character audio recordings got interrupted.

the only thing that makes me think it could be something on my phone is, that it happens in "bursts". within lets say 20 words it happens 4 or 5 times, before and after no problem. the other side is that i never experienced something like that on pre-2.4 versions

 

[mothbox]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

When copying onto the clipboard and opening Pleco I'm getting a white screen with the characters on. Have to back space to get to the dictionary and then paste the characters into the search bar. This only happens after Ive done a good few clipboard to Pleco which work perfectly, then suddenly its the white screen.

 

[leynux]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

In the last stable version, if I search for example word “冤枉”， I can easily tap on a single character to find character by character exact meaning.
This beta always highlight whole words.

 

[leynux]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

In Reader, from landscape orientation, when i have few pages of text, scrolling to LAST page or nearly last, then auto rotate to portrait .. suddenly i have blank page, a few last text missing, need to switch back to landscpae to read last page

when i at early pages its normal.

 

[stephanhodges]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

Is there any way to "record" the audio from the TTS, so that I can show off the speed and "overlapping" issue?

BTW, I wish this was an option, to be able to generate audio for "sections" of text to a file.

Stephan

 

[mikelove]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

the only thing that makes me think it could be something on my phone is, that it happens in "bursts". within lets say 20 words it happens 4 or 5 times, before and after no problem. the other side is that i never experienced something like that on pre-2.4 versions

We can do a little more BT headset testing, but assuming that doesn't unearth anything new the only change I can think of that might help would be to add an option to continuously play silence in the background during flashcard tests - it'll eat up a lot of battery life (both on the device and on the headset end) but it would keep the system from having to keep disconnecting / reconnecting the headset every time audio is played.

When copying onto the clipboard and opening Pleco I'm getting a white screen with the characters on. Have to back space to get to the dictionary and then paste the characters into the search bar. This only happens after Ive done a good few clipboard to Pleco which work perfectly, then suddenly its the white screen.

Any chance you might have enabled the option to bring up the document reader for long searches?

In the last stable version, if I search for example word “冤枉”， I can easily tap on a single character to find character by character exact meaning.
This beta always highlight whole words.

Yes, that's now a configurable option - Settings / Popup Definition / Headword tap action -> Select Word, you'll want to change it to Select Char. Though actually it should be defaulting to its old behavior for consistency's sake - we'll fix that in the finished release, thanks.

Is there any way to "record" the audio from the TTS, so that I can show off the speed and "overlapping" issue?

Not at the moment - actually we've found that live and pre-generated output can vary significantly both in this and in other TTSes, so it wouldn't necessarily help that much. But if you have another recording device (a second smartphone/tablet or even your computer's microphone) that should be able to pick up the overlapping if it's prominent.

That being said, we've already added a speed configuration option for the minor beta update we'll be pushing out shortly, and slowed it down a bit by default - if that doesn't improve matters we can look at going back to the other system or perhaps even supporting both through plugins (which we've worked out a way to do now); the first system was eventually going to come in anyway for other languages and it isn't really a licensing problem to make its Chinese system available as an option now.

BTW, I wish this was an option, to be able to generate audio for "sections" of text to a file.

It could be - the system supports it and our license permits it - but there's enough UI trickiness involved that we'd need to see some significant demand for it first.

 

[mothbox]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

When copying onto the clipboard and opening Pleco I'm getting a white screen with the characters on. Have to back space to get to the dictionary and then paste the characters into the search bar. This only happens after Ive done a good few clipboard to Pleco which work perfectly, then suddenly its the white screen.

Any chance you might have enabled the option to bring up the document reader for long searches?

If I ever find the option I think that might be it!

 

[stephanhodges]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

the only change I can think of that might help would be to add an option to continuously play silence in the background during flashcard tests - it'll eat up a lot of battery life

I once worked on a project with something similar regarding battery life. Rather than continuous, we were able to change to 10 milliseconds on and 990 ms off to achieve same effect (it wasn't phone/headset related however). I don't know the time for headsets to "time out and disconnect", but I suspect there's some play there. So, you might be able to send extremely small "bursts" of silence to keep the headset connected during flashcard sessions, or combine that with your own controlled time out values to disconnect if the person doesn't have any flashcard activity in xx amount of time, etc. (to minimize battery drain).

Regarding saving of audio from TTS engine, would you (or anyone reading this) happen to know of any other Android software that could intercept and record the audio playing?

I'm trying to get something else to record externally/independently, but I'm currently in Northern India, and it's hard to get things like that here. It might take a couple weeks.

 

[mfcb]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

We can do a little more BT headset testing, but assuming that doesn't unearth anything new the only change I can think of that might help would be to add an option to continuously play silence in the background during flashcard tests - it'll eat up a lot of battery life (both on the device and on the headset end) but it would keep the system from having to keep disconnecting / reconnecting the headset every time audio is played.

no need to implement that option, i would not turn it on, hehe, battery life is sacred.
yesterday evening it happened on one out of 100 cards, i can live with that. as long as nobody else complains, and until i have better evidence, just blame it on my phone/headset.

 

[mikelove]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

FWIW, the Android beta versions of Adso/HDD/CFDICT have all been updated to the new faster index, and for good measure we also updated CC-CEDICT to fix a full-text search bug, so if you're using any of those, update them and you should hopefully see some significant performance improvements.

I once worked on a project with something similar regarding battery life. Rather than continuous, we were able to change to 10 milliseconds on and 990 ms off to achieve same effect (it wasn't phone/headset related however). I don't know the time for headsets to "time out and disconnect", but I suspect there's some play there. So, you might be able to send extremely small "bursts" of silence to keep the headset connected during flashcard sessions, or combine that with your own controlled time out values to disconnect if the person doesn't have any flashcard activity in xx amount of time, etc. (to minimize battery drain).

I think in this case (at least from what I know of how these work) that wouldn't help because the system doesn't power down instantly - it waits in case any more data comes in and then turns off after a second or so. So this alternating 10ms / 990ms business might keep us from having to continuously send it audio, but it probably wouldn't keep the device from keeping its antenna active / battery draining.

Regarding saving of audio from TTS engine, would you (or anyone reading this) happen to know of any other Android software that could intercept and record the audio playing?

Would probably be a hack for rooted devices that did that but I'm not sure about the name.

I'm trying to get something else to record externally/independently, but I'm currently in Northern India, and it's hard to get things like that here. It might take a couple weeks.

Hopefully the speed setting in the update will fix this for you and that won't even be necessary.

no need to implement that option, i would not turn it on, hehe, battery life is sacred.
yesterday evening it happened on one out of 100 cards, i can live with that. as long as nobody else complains, and until i have better evidence, just blame it on my phone/headset.

OK, though we'll at least do some more testing in case there turns out to be something here we can reproduce.

 

[HW60]

Re: Pleco for Android 2.4.0 Beta 4 Bug Report / Feedback Thr

In the last stable version, if I search for example word “冤枉”， I can easily tap on a single character to find character by character exact meaning. This beta always highlight whole words.

Yes, that's now a configurable option - Settings / Popup Definition / Headword tap action -> Select Word, you'll want to change it to Select Char. Though actually it should be defaulting to its old behavior for consistency's sake - we'll fix that in the finished release, thanks.

Actually whatever I select I get the whole word.