After starting to use the Pleco-integrated reader regularly, I thought I’d give a little feedback.
Starting off, I’ve come to find it even more useful than I thought. I had read a few novels in Chinese before and generally got by quite fine, only needed to look up words occasionally, especially if I didn’t have the ambition to understand every single word. Having now started with the Dream of the Red Chamber however, Pleco integration has proven invaluable for looking up the plethora of 18th century Chinese cultural vocabulary (clothing, architecture, official titles…) which I’m not familiar with, not to speak of the fact that entries for the more important characters help keeping track of the huge cast.
Nevertheless, I have a few minor suggestions how the reading experience could be improved even further:
Starting off, I’ve come to find it even more useful than I thought. I had read a few novels in Chinese before and generally got by quite fine, only needed to look up words occasionally, especially if I didn’t have the ambition to understand every single word. Having now started with the Dream of the Red Chamber however, Pleco integration has proven invaluable for looking up the plethora of 18th century Chinese cultural vocabulary (clothing, architecture, official titles…) which I’m not familiar with, not to speak of the fact that entries for the more important characters help keeping track of the huge cast.
Nevertheless, I have a few minor suggestions how the reading experience could be improved even further:
- Rudimentary text editing. At the moment, I’m mainly using txt files which another user here uploaded once. However these occasionally contain small errors (e.g. rarer characters having become garbled in encoding, or a forgotten punctuation mark). It would be awesome if I were able to correct these without having to change to a different app and then reloading the file in Pleco.
- In-order bookmarking. As it is, Pleco bookmarks are by default ordered chronologically in the order they were added and the user can reorder them at will. I would like an option to change the default order to the order in which they are in the document. So for example if I have bookmarks A and B and then add a third bookmark between the two, I’d like it to appear between A and B in the list instead of at the end.
- Page numbers for bookmarks. This is a really minor one. I think it would make the bookmark list more descriptive if it displayed the page number when in paginated mode.
- Graphical indication for bookmarks in the text. Again, a really minor one. I’d like to see an indication (a small icon or something similar) where I added a bookmark in the text.
- A search function. This would be useful for various purposes, e.g. for use as a concordance, for adding bookmarks to chapter beginnings (as chapter headers often follow patterns such as numbering) etc.
- Punctuation-sensitive line breaks. Another minor one. The reader would give an even better reading experience if line breaks took punctuation into account. Specifically, it should prevent line breaks directly in front of most punctuation marks (except for those which work like an opening parenthesis such as （, 《, 「, “ etc. in which case there should be no line break directly behind them). It does not sound like a particularly performance intensive task, but in case I’m wrong, maybe users of weaker devices would like an option to turn it off.
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