Problems in Guifan dictionary entries?

[plec1.usr923844]

I have recently installed the Xiandai hanyu guifan cidian and have seen a few entries with the following two problems (if they are indeed problems). The entry for 掰 bāi has both:

• Just before the last sentence there appears a special character which looks like a standing rectangular box, crossed through with an X, which is usually used to indicate an unavailable Unicode character. Is this some special character that can't be displayed on the iPhone?
• Also in the last sentence, a question mark in brackets "(?)" appears. I guess this shouldn't normally appear in the dictionary? At least I don't see a reason why it should be here.

Thanks, and apologies if this has been discussed already.

 

[mikelove]

I have recently installed the Xiandai hanyu guifan cidian and have seen a few entries with the following two problems (if they are indeed problems). The entry for 掰 bāi has both:

• Just before the last sentence there appears a special character which looks like a standing rectangular box, crossed through with an X, which is usually used to indicate an unavailable Unicode character. Is this some special character that can't be displayed on the iPhone?

• 
  
  Yes - the iPhone used to include a font called Arial Unicode that covered it, but they took it out and none of the replacement fonts seem to have it either. We're planning to replace it with a different character the next time we update the database - it's just a symbol so not too important.
  
  

  [*]Also in the last sentence, a question mark in brackets "(?)" appears. I guess this shouldn't normally appear in the dictionary? At least I don't see a reason why it should be here.

Those are partially-completed characters - bits of strokes and so on that aren't part of any normal Chinese font. Coding all of those in has been on our to-do list, but we've been waiting for our new license for the newest edition of Guifan (which we've been planning to offer as a free upgrade to previous Guifan buyers) to come through first - don't want to have to put in all of that effort for a database that we're about to replace.

 

[plec1.usr923844]

Thank you for your reply (for the app in general, actually). I'm looking forward to these improvements!