Pleco for Android Beta 3 Bug Report Thread

[mikelove]

I've just installed Android Beta 3 and came across a strange bug while playing around. I'm very new to Pleco (downloaded for the first time 10 hours ago) so maybe I'm doing something wrong - here's what I was experiencing:
I looked up the character 须 by radical. I entered the 3 claws and then wanted to select 须 from the choices that were shown. However, touching on 须 didn't do anything.
(1) Any other character on the screen that I tried, I could select without a problem.
(2) I had no problems with other characters based on different radicals.
(3) The 须 appears as the 1st character on the 2nd line of choices. With other radicals, I could select from this position on the screen without any problem.

We're seeing this here too now - looks like a number conversion issue. Anyway, we've already fixed it for the next beta - thanks!

 

[MentatYP]

I upgraded my previous beta install with beta 3, and now OCR won't work. Says:

OCR Not Installed
Sorry, the OCR system database file does not appear to be installed.

When I first ran the app it asked if I wanted to download 14MB of files, and I said, "Yes". After a few failed attempts it finished downloading and I'm able to use the app, but OCR isn't working. It was working before on the previous beta. I remember installing some add-on files manually for the first beta version, but I assumed this one would download everything needed since it prompted to download files.

 

[Marc Vermeiren]

Mike,

I'm testing this on a Xoom, US bought, stock Android 3.2 Kernel 2.6.36.3-gb899528

Trying the 'Flashcards - Review Flashcards - Interface' menu produces a 'Sorry! The application .... has stopped unexpectedly. ... Force close'. Should I try CatLog or something?
Given that I'm on a tablet, I tried if I could get the Sketch area next to the test question area in landscape mode, which would be very handy. No switching from Sketch to Test, both on one screen...

Also,
any idea on when the Oxford will be available?

Thanks for the great work!

 

[leynux]

hi,

I installed on Samsung galaxy S2, OCR detection works, but sometimes rubbish characters keep on searching right words unending. -> exit program -> start (still error) -> after sometime start OK.


Did i miss any setting.

 

[mikelove]

I upgraded my previous beta install with beta 3, and now OCR won't work. Says:

OCR Not Installed
Sorry, the OCR system database file does not appear to be installed.

When I first ran the app it asked if I wanted to download 14MB of files, and I said, "Yes". After a few failed attempts it finished downloading and I'm able to use the app, but OCR isn't working. It was working before on the previous beta. I remember installing some add-on files manually for the first beta version, but I assumed this one would download everything needed since it prompted to download files.

Did a prompt come up after you registered telling you that you hadn't downloaded some of your purchased add-ons yet and offering to download them for you? If not, perhaps there's a bug... anyway, go into the "Add-ons" screen and tap on the download button next to the OCR item to download it.

I'm testing this on a Xoom, US bought, stock Android 3.2 Kernel 2.6.36.3-gb899528

Trying the 'Flashcards - Review Flashcards - Interface' menu produces a 'Sorry! The application .... has stopped unexpectedly. ... Force close'. Should I try CatLog or something?
Given that I'm on a tablet, I tried if I could get the Sketch area next to the test question area in landscape mode, which would be very handy. No switching from Sketch to Test, both on one screen...

Yes, if you could use aLogcat or CatLog that would be great, thanks.

I installed on Samsung galaxy S2, OCR detection works, but sometimes rubbish characters keep on searching right words unending. -> exit program -> start (still error) -> after sometime start OK.

Could you expand on this a bit? Where on the screen are those garbage characters appearing? Or is the problem that the characters you're looking for occasionally change to incorrect / garbage ones?

 

[HedgePig]

....I looked up the character 须 by radical. I entered the 3 claws and then wanted to select 须 from the choices that were shown. However, touching on 须 didn't do anything.....

We're seeing this here too now - looks like a number conversion issue. Anyway, we've already fixed it for the next beta - thanks!

Hello Mike

I've also subsequently found that for the 车 radical, there are are very sfew selections that register after choosing the redical. (Maybe this has already been fixed - I just wasn't certain from your response whether the fix you mentioned addresses the specific problem or something more general.)

Regards
HedgePig

 

[leynux]

I installed on Samsung galaxy S2, OCR detection works, but sometimes rubbish characters keep on searching right words unending. -> exit program -> start (still error) -> after sometime start OK.

Could you expand on this a bit? Where on the screen are those garbage characters appearing? Or is the problem that the characters you're looking for occasionally change to incorrect / garbage ones?

sorry, it's not really garbage.. it's non ending incorrect characters on live OCR.

I've just played around with still image OCR. Works. only one problem when i try to expand (resize) the green box, application exited.

Anyhow works great, today I got my bundle registration ID.

 

[MentatYP]

I upgraded my previous beta install with beta 3, and now OCR won't work. Says:

OCR Not Installed
Sorry, the OCR system database file does not appear to be installed.

When I first ran the app it asked if I wanted to download 14MB of files, and I said, "Yes". After a few failed attempts it finished downloading and I'm able to use the app, but OCR isn't working. It was working before on the previous beta. I remember installing some add-on files manually for the first beta version, but I assumed this one would download everything needed since it prompted to download files.

Did a prompt come up after you registered telling you that you hadn't downloaded some of your purchased add-ons yet and offering to download them for you? If not, perhaps there's a bug... anyway, go into the "Add-ons" screen and tap on the download button next to the OCR item to download it.

Downloading manually worked. No, it didn't prompt me to download add-ons after firing it up the first time. You mentioned registering but I didn't have to register it, or maybe I'm misunderstanding the term. Anyway, it didn't prompt for the OCR module or any of the other add-ons I'm pretty sure I had for the previous beta--pronunciation, ABC dictionaries, etc.--so I downloaded those manually as well.

 

[CramminginCuba]

Hi there, this may be a bug or just my technoineptitude...anyhow, I downloaded the new beta and tried importing a few sets of flashcards I downloaded from the exchange (all .txt files). I din't mess around with any of the settings on the import screen, just chose the file and then clicked "begin import." But none of the files imported successfully, all gave me the "Import Failed" message saying "the import did not complete successfully." Am I just missing a step here, or is this a bug? Thanks for any help you can give!

 

[mikelove]

I've also subsequently found that for the 车 radical, there are are very sfew selections that register after choosing the redical. (Maybe this has already been fixed - I just wasn't certain from your response whether the fix you mentioned addresses the specific problem or something more general.)

Yes, it relates to Unicode code point values so for radicals with a lot of strokes it's likely that most of the characters would fail - stupid bug but easy to fix for the next beta.

sorry, it's not really garbage.. it's non ending incorrect characters on live OCR.

Ah, that usually means the image is poorly-lit or out of focus so that the system still thinks there are characters there to recognize but can't see them clearly enough to have a reliable idea of what they look like.

I've just played around with still image OCR. Works. only one problem when i try to expand (resize) the green box, application exited.

Could you please send your crash log? Use the free aLogcat or CatLog utility in Android Market to generate that.

Downloading manually worked. No, it didn't prompt me to download add-ons after firing it up the first time. You mentioned registering but I didn't have to register it, or maybe I'm misunderstanding the term. Anyway, it didn't prompt for the OCR module or any of the other add-ons I'm pretty sure I had for the previous beta--pronunciation, ABC dictionaries, etc.--so I downloaded those manually as well.

That's odd; what should have happened is that you started up the new version of Pleco, it put up a prompt telling you that your hardware ID didn't match and offering to update it from our server, you tapped "yes" on that, it contacted our server to re-register, brought up a prompt confirming that it had registered successfully, then contacted our server again and brought up another prompt telling you that you had purchased items that weren't downloaded yet. Did it fail to put up that hardware changed prompt on startup, or did it fail to bring up the update prompt after that?

Hi there, this may be a bug or just my technoineptitude...anyhow, I downloaded the new beta and tried importing a few sets of flashcards I downloaded from the exchange (all .txt files). I din't mess around with any of the settings on the import screen, just chose the file and then clicked "begin import." But none of the files imported successfully, all gave me the "Import Failed" message saying "the import did not complete successfully." Am I just missing a step here, or is this a bug? Thanks for any help you can give!

That's odd... The fact that that message is coming up suggests that this is a bug in the importer rather than a crash... which files did you download? And where did you store the files on your phone?

 

[CramminginCuba]

I downloaded gobear's Pimsleur wordlist as well as gobear's HSK 1-4. They were saved in my downloads folder on my phone. HTC Legend. After you asked which files I downloaded, I realized they were all created by the same user. So, I tried another file, the 3000 character list, and that worked fine. Strange I still can't import gobear's stuff though, as other users seem to be managing okay with that.

 

[blackrook]

Can't add anything to flashcards

When I try to add any word to flashcards I got the following message: "Sorry, the flashcard could not be crated because your flashcard file could not be accessed - please exit and reopen Pleco and try again". It might be so because I've moved files to '/data/data/com.pleco.chinesesystem/files' (I had to, because I have no space on my sdcard), but I tried to change permissions of 'com.pleco.chinesesystem' recursively (even to 0777), but it didn't work out. What should the permissions be like to get the flashcards to work?

Samsung Galaxy SL i9003, Android 2.3.4, ClockworkMod (EXT4-formatted)

 

[MentatYP]

That's odd; what should have happened is that you started up the new version of Pleco, it put up a prompt telling you that your hardware ID didn't match and offering to update it from our server, you tapped "yes" on that, it contacted our server to re-register, brought up a prompt confirming that it had registered successfully, then contacted our server again and brought up another prompt telling you that you had purchased items that weren't downloaded yet. Did it fail to put up that hardware changed prompt on startup, or did it fail to bring up the update prompt after that?

I uninstalled and downloaded the new .apk and installed it manually. I know how betas are sometimes so I wanted to start from scratch. I don't recall there being any mention of registration at all, but maybe that's just because of how I installed it?

 

[mikelove]

I downloaded gobear's Pimsleur wordlist as well as gobear's HSK 1-4. They were saved in my downloads folder on my phone. HTC Legend. After you asked which files I downloaded, I realized they were all created by the same user. So, I tried another file, the 3000 character list, and that worked fine. Strange I still can't import gobear's stuff though, as other users seem to be managing okay with that.

Ah, looks like a filename issue - Android does those through URIs so the %20s in the file name get parsed as spaces and we end up opening a different file than the one you selected. Should be easy to fix in the next beta - in the meantime, rename the file to get rid of all of the % characters and it should import fine.

When I try to add any word to flashcards I got the following message: "Sorry, the flashcard could not be crated because your flashcard file could not be accessed - please exit and reopen Pleco and try again". It might be so because I've moved files to '/data/data/com.pleco.chinesesystem/files' (I had to, because I have no space on my sdcard), but I tried to change permissions of 'com.pleco.chinesesystem' recursively (even to 0777), but it didn't work out. What should the permissions be like to get the flashcards to work?

Hmm... are you sure that's actually where the flashcards are being stored? Did you completely exit and reopen Pleco after changing that setting and changing the directory permissions? Exactly which path is selected in Pleco?

I uninstalled and downloaded the new .apk and installed it manually. I know how betas are sometimes so I wanted to start from scratch. I don't recall there being any mention of registration at all, but maybe that's just because of how I installed it?

Ah, that explains it - uninstalling probably also deleted the saved registration info, so it would have been as if you were downloading a brand new copy. Thanks.

 

[blackrook]

Hmm... are you sure that's actually where the flashcards are being stored? Did you completely exit and reopen Pleco after changing that setting and changing the directory permissions? Exactly which path is selected in Pleco?

It was very simple, I'm sorry. vfat/exfat/fat32 doesn't allow to store any information about permissions and owner, so when I copied the (with -p or something like that) the system kept the default owner/group for this case, i.e. 'system:system'. So "chown -R app_97:app_97 /data/data/com.pleco.chinesesystem/files" worked, umm, 'like charm'. Thanks for support!

 

[cai]

A post from the Beta 2 thread (about Huawei Ideos X5 U8800):

When activating the camera OCR, the image is rotated 90 degrees clockwise. If I go to settings and then tap back, the image then looks normal. Character recognition does not work in either case. When focusing on a character, the screen shows the OCR going through a list of character without settling down on one. Sometimes it tries to fit a letter from the roman alphabet. Rotating the phone or the paper does not help. Still image recognition works perfectly with photos taken with the camera.

We've had a few other reports of this, though we haven't yet managed to reproduce this on a phone here - since the Ideos X5 is relatively inexpensive perhaps we should just go out and buy one to test on. Thanks.

Here's an image of the issue:
http://i.imgur.com/UevSR.jpg
Standard CD case on the table seen through the live-OCR scan: image is rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise and stretched.

 

[mikelove]

It was very simple, I'm sorry. vfat/exfat/fat32 doesn't allow to store any information about permissions and owner, so when I copied the (with -p or something like that) the system kept the default owner/group for this case, i.e. 'system:system'. So "chown -R app_97:app_97 /data/data/com.pleco.chinesesystem/files" worked, umm, 'like charm'. Thanks for support!

Ah, that explains it - thanks for the follow-up.

A post from the Beta 2 thread (about Huawei Ideos X5 U8800):

When activating the camera OCR, the image is rotated 90 degrees clockwise. If I go to settings and then tap back, the image then looks normal. Character recognition does not work in either case. When focusing on a character, the screen shows the OCR going through a list of character without settling down on one. Sometimes it tries to fit a letter from the roman alphabet. Rotating the phone or the paper does not help. Still image recognition works perfectly with photos taken with the camera.

We've had a few other reports of this, though we haven't yet managed to reproduce this on a phone here - since the Ideos X5 is relatively inexpensive perhaps we should just go out and buy one to test on. Thanks.

Here's an image of the issue:
http://i.imgur.com/UevSR.jpg
Standard CD case on the table seen through the live-OCR scan: image is rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise and stretched.

Ah, I didn't realize that the picture was incorrectly oriented too... is your phone running Android 2.3? If so, try downloading Beta 3 (not 3b) from:

http://www.pleco.com/plecodroid-110910.apk

That added some orientation-detection / fixing support which we had to take out in Beta 3b since it was causing more problems than it was fixing; if it helps in your case, though, we can keep working on how to put it back in.

 

[mikelove]

Sorry, two that I forgot to respond to from earlier:

There actually should be a custom Pleco keyboard popping up there instead (we force-hide the system one since we can't control its hiding / showing consistently). So you go into that screen now and there's nothing? Do you have an external keyboard attached to your phone by any chance?

I go to the screen, and I see all the relevant test stuff (headword, pron, definition, etc.), and the various buttons. As I said, I can also enter in text by forcing Android to display a keyboard. But I see no evidence of a custom Pleco keyboard... I also don't use an external keyboard (as far as I'm aware - I'd be pretty worried if it turned out I was!)

Hmm... might be a bug in our code for detecting an external keyboard, then. We'll see if we can reproduce this on a Nexus One here... thanks.

Not sure whether this is a bug or not?; but when I'm in Pleco and want to increase the volume of the audio (as it's quieter than most media), I press the hard volume up key on the phone, but this simply changes the phone "ring" volume. In most programmes with audio output pressing these keys changes the "media" volume which is what is required.

At the moment I need to go into "phone settings>sound>media volume" before and after each time I start Pleco to adjust, which is a pain.

Unless, of course, I'm missing the obvious, which is quite possible .

It is indeed a bug - one-line code fix which we've now implemented successfully for the next beta, thanks!

 

[villagepark]

Using a Tmobile galaxy S T959 andriod 2.2 kernel 2.6.32.9

OCR does not work. Whenever i click it (from the menu or the input list) the screen freezes for a bit and then goes to a black screen with just the andriod notification bar on the top for a while and then finally it goes back to the home screen and i get a popup saying that pleco has crashed.

 

[cai]

Here's an image of the issue:
http://i.imgur.com/UevSR.jpg
Standard CD case on the table seen through the live-OCR scan: image is rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise and stretched.

Ah, I didn't realize that the picture was incorrectly oriented too... is your phone running Android 2.3? If so, try downloading Beta 3 (not 3b) from:

http://www.pleco.com/plecodroid-110910.apk

That added some orientation-detection / fixing support which we had to take out in Beta 3b since it was causing more problems than it was fixing; if it helps in your case, though, we can keep working on how to put it back in.

Sorry, I don't have Huawei myself anymore... had it for a while... it was just 7$... sold it for a decent profit
The picture was from my brother's phone. I think he has 2.2 and has no plans updating to 2.3 any time soon.
So I guess we have to wait for someone else to test this now. Maybe the user, eemeli, who first posted about the orientation issue on Huawei could help you out.

I'm still using iPhone myself (mainly because of Pleco) but would like to switch to Android for other reasons. But the fragmentation seems to be such a chore with Android as this thread shows out