Pleco Wishlist

Zachary

Member
Hi Mike,

I'm a long time user. In fact, (continuing with the user theme) I'm quite addicted to pleco. But I'd say I'm not addicted enough. I dream of a world where Pleco becomes my complete portal to the language of Chinese. And I think you do to. So in that respect, I'd like to start this thread for users to just brainstorm ideas for what they'd love to see in future Pleco editions.

To start out, I'd say that the biggest area where Pleco is lacking (not counting a desktop version, of course) is in its Pasteboard area. This is a great feature, and I use it all the time. But it's too low-tech. I'd love there to be a pleco plugin for both web browsers and for pdf readers. This plug-in would allow users to use proper software for viewing the medium of their choice while still being able to click on individual characters and allowing Pleco dictionaries to guide us as well as allowing the user to save words to flashcard lists for later study. As much as I appreciate the pasteboard, cutting and pasting to it will always fall far behind using the right software; and the webrowser is so slow and problematic that I'd soon cut and paste content from my desktop, email it to my ipad, and then cut and paste it into the pasteboard.

Thank you so much for making Chinese proficiency an accessible goal for me, and for having such a responsive and responsible company.

Zachary
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Zachary said:
To start out, I'd say that the biggest area where Pleco is lacking (not counting a desktop version, of course) is in its Pasteboard area. This is a great feature, and I use it all the time. But it's too low-tech. I'd love there to be a pleco plugin for both web browsers and for pdf readers. This plug-in would allow users to use proper software for viewing the medium of their choice while still being able to click on individual characters and allowing Pleco dictionaries to guide us as well as allowing the user to save words to flashcard lists for later study. As much as I appreciate the pasteboard, cutting and pasting to it will always fall far behind using the right software; and the webrowser is so slow and problematic that I'd soon cut and paste content from my desktop, email it to my ipad, and then cut and paste it into the pasteboard.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Unfortunately, technical constraints make something like this rather difficult on mobile devices - neither iOS nor Android currently supports a browser plugin architecture, at least not one that's accessible to third-party developers. The built-in web browser on iOS is about the best we can do - reformatting pages as we download them to make characters tappable, or letting you highlight a piece of text on a non-reformatted page and tap on a button to pull it up in a separate screen. We're looking at how we might be able to provide a third option that's triggered simply on a text highlight, though it's kind of tricky to hook that into iOS.

As far as PDF files, we're working on adding PDF support to our OCR system so that should be pretty smooth once it's ready - wouldn't impose a significant slowdown in opening or panning around files.
 
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