screen OCR immersive mode issue

[elsey.jack]

Pixel 4a with Android 12 running Pleco 3.2.86

I'm reading a novel in the Kindle app, which defaults to immersive mode (full-screen) when you're scrolling through text. Tapping the screen brings up the system bars and app controls.

Pleco's screen OCR works like a charm if the system bars are visible when you activate it. If the system bars aren't visible the OCR still works, but the definition window has an odd vertical offset and no longer points at the word you tapped.

This certainly isn't a huge issue, but I wonder if there's a workaround? The Kindle app doesn't allow you to disable immersive mode, unfortunately.

screen OCR with system bars visible


screen OCR without system bars visible

 

[mikelove]

Not aware of any workaround, no. Can check and see if there's an obvious explanation here the next time we do a bug fix update but I suspect it's just a weird interaction between this particular version of Android on this particular model of phone and this particular version of Kindle. I've been holding out hope for years that Google would use the occasion of punch outs / foldable displays / etc to actually add some sort of standard 'where + how big is the usable area of this screen' API but they've stubbornly refused to do so and so it remains a confusing jungle of different implementations.

I've also thought about adding some sort of a 'manual screen OCR window size adjustment' feature but I don't know when that might ship - could have a crude version of it working very quickly, but I don't know how many people would use it if it were just, say, a couple of numbers you typed into a box in Settings; to usefully solve the problem it would have to support dynamic / live adjustment and swap out different settings for each app + screen orientation and that of course is a lot more work.