Suggestions / BUGS PlecoDict

[Anonymous]

I've been waiting a long time for the ABC dictionary to be ready. It looks like it's getting close. I'm happy to see that I can now use my Chinese OS to enter characters. But I still haven't decided whether I'll buy it now, or wait for the next release. My concerns:

1. Instant access works with Notebook, but causes a system crash with Supermemo. (Acer s60 PDA)

2. Radical lookup usually crashes the system. I understand that this is a known bug.

3. Searching is unintuitive for the ABC dictionary. I don't know if it's buggy or intended. If I type "anzhuang" I see an4zhuang1 but I don't see an1zhuang1. I guess this is because the electonic ordering isn't based on the toneless alphabetical ordering of the print version. This is a step backwards, in my opinion. What makes the ABC dictionary most innovative is it's "electronic" alphabetization of entries, which is without respect to syllables. I think the electronic version should do the same. If I type "anzhuang" then it should be the same as if I was looking in the print dictionary. In the list, I would see maybe 3 entries before "anzhuang" and the rest of the list would be all the entries after. The first definition for "anzhuang" (an1zhuang1) would be shown in the dictionary area.

4. If I type "aotu" I see "aotuban," but have to go up to see "aotu." Maybe that's just a searching bug.

5. The entry field is cleared when switching dictionaries. I don't think that it's necessary. But this isn't too important.

 

[mikelove]

You might want to wait for the next release - 3 and 4 are already fixed in our current builds, and 5 will be an option in our revamped multi-screen Preferences dialog. I'm not as certain about 1 and 2, of course we're going to fix them for the finished version but they may not make it into this one.

 

[Anonymous]

If you've got the alphebatization/search fixed, then that's worth waiting for. I'll be looking forward to it! Thanks.

 

[goulniky]

DIA support

I was wondering if your upcoming PlecoDict release would fix the little DIA bug I find on my UX50, whereby it always opens in full screen (480x320) but only uses the 320x320 area, the rest being cleared out. To make it fully use the 480x320 area, I need to press the little DIA blue arrow at top right twice (once to tell PlecoDict to think I'm using 320x320, and one to tell it to properly refresh in 480x320 mode).
thx/Yv

 

[mikelove]

Yes - it now works correctly on our UX50 here and the change will be included in the upcoming bug-fix update. (as will the two search bugs I mentioned in my previous posting, along with a couple of other ones - we managed to get NWP searches working correctly without even updating the database)

 

[goulniky]

I stumbled again across this character recognition problem in progressive mode (where every stroke incrementally updates the possible matches).
It doesn't really bother me as I seldom use it, and I guess it's simply a performance problem but it makes hard it to use: I think recognition sort of works but the feedback display of the strokes I draw is completely jagged. I run this on a UX50 with (almost) all dict files on an external MS.

 

[mikelove]

Have you tried enabling the "Smooth HWR input lines" option in Preferences? That should get rid of the jaggedness.

 

[Anonymous]

haven't tried it, but I have no such problem in "regular" mode

 

[mikelove]

Hmm... well you could definitely encounter problems if you start drawing the next stroke while the previous one is still being processed - there really isn't much we can do about that until we get our new handwriting recognizer up and running. Depending on how fast you are at writing characters, the dynamic recognition feature may not really be useful on anything except 400+ MHz devices like the Tungsten T3/T5/C (and even on those it's not perfect).

 

[Anonymous]

Just installed the new update (0.85). The automated installer didn't work though, it says something about "file acces error", so i used the manual version.

I'm not sure why but it seems that some characters are missing now! I saw a few words that goes; ??pinyin etc.

??tongxing (definition)
??huaxing "
??tonghang "
??weixu "
etc.

Also, I was sad to see that one particular bug (that has really been buggin me) is not fixed yet. When you bring up the instant acces window on top of another the system freezes and has to be reset. I have lost notes many times by accidently doing this

No one else has brought this up, so maybe its just a problem on my machine (TE)?!

 

[Jim]

Installed 0.85. Seem to have lost the ability to change font size though with the better fonts it is not so important. Using G99 (GSL G18) in case the problem is specific to this unit.

 

[chaiusa]

radical input doesn't work

i just tried the new update (0.85). I found that every time i used the radical input, my palm crashed and got to reset. My palm is sony tj-35.

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for all the feedback.

The "file access error" probably had something to do with a corrupted download file - I've checked the installer files on the server and they seem to be solid.

The missing character problem was actually around before - there are some rare characters we still haven't gotten arount to adding to our font files.

I wasn't aware of that bug with instant access - unfortunately there's almost no way we could make that work properly (running one copy of a program on top of another is a very bad idea on Palm OS), so the bug in this case is that the instant access trigger still works when the dictionary is in instant access mode. But when we finally release a version with back/forward buttons this hopefully won't matter so much.

The font size problem might have to do with the old fonts getting mixed up with the new ones - delete and reinstall PlecoDict and you should have no problems changing font sizes. (the new fonts should have replaced the old ones, but if you had the old ones installed on an SD card and installed the new ones to RAM without deleting the old ones you might encounter problems)

chaiusa, did the radical input work before you installed 0.85? We fixed one bug with that but there are still several problems. We haven't really made it a priority since we're still putting together the finished radical data file (and the one that's in there now isn't very useful anyway).

 

[chaiusa]

radical input problem

mike,

I think I know where the problem came from. after I enabled "input field compatibility mode" to use penpower, while using radical input, it causes the system to crash.

hope you fix this

 

[mikelove]

Try this version: http://www.pleco.com/pd086update.zip - it should fix that radical problem along with the instant access crash. Plus we fixed the bug in instant access where it always starts up with the large-size font. Thanks again for the feedback.

 

[Jim]

Font size problem resolved, wasn't a font file as I tried reinstalling those first so some other file but it doesn't matter as all is fine now. Thanks Mike. You are making progress and it is appreciated.

 

[Jim]

new quirk

Just noticed that the cut, copy and paste icons are gone. As these icons have been missing from the command bar since the first Plecodict preview version they can now only be accessed from the menus which is a little cumbersome. Even though icons at the top are one tap quicker I still prefer them in the command bar as that is where they are with all other software and habits are hard to kick.

 

[Jim]

invalid line number

Suddenly started getting "invalid line number" error message. Downloaded and installed 0.86 but it persists. Using G99 (GSL G18).

 

[mikelove]

Yikes, looks like one of our debugging messages managed to sneak into the release version (the reference to customer support is something we put in in case of mistakes like this).

Which means we're now up to 0.87: see http://www.pleco.com/pd087update.zip - there are a couple of other fixes for rare bugs in here, and the cut/copy/paste icons have been restored to the toolbar but won't show up on the command bar until our next big release. (details on that will go out by e-mail as soon as we stop finding major bugs in this version) If you start up this version and the cut/copy/paste icons don't appear, delete and reinstall and that should fix it.

 

[mikelove]

BTW, do you happen to remember what you were doing when those messages came up? They're not indicative of a serious problem but it would be nice to know what was causing them in your case.