[Unofficial] Feature Request / Suggestion List

[jurgen85]

I believe that information is extracted from ABC; if you have ABC installed this information also displays in Pleco.

The only trace I've seen of that is when creating a custom flashcard, but the underdots are removed everywhere else, even when I have ABC as the primary dict.

For example, if creating a custom flashcard from the ABC entry for 过来:

你∼一下。 Nǐ ∼ yị̄xià.

My suggestion is to add dots automatically everywhere. This shouldn't need to change the underlying data, but could be applied at a stage near adding tone color.

 

[bokane]

Nothing even approaching a high priority, but now that the (32-bit, abandonware) Unihan Variant Dictionary is incompatible with Catalina and future MacOS releases, it'd be nice to have another way of finding variant forms of characters.

Currently this sort-of works by going into the Unihan dictionary settings and toggling several things on (TraditionalVariant, SemanticVariant, SimplifiedVariant, SpecializedSemanticVariant, ZVariant), but it's not clear (to me, at least) what distinguishes these categories -- why the entry for 國, e.g., lists 囯 as a SemanticVariant, 国 as a SimplifiedVariant, and 圀 as a ZVariant. (Unihan Variant Dictionary also identifies the variant forms 囻 and 囶; I don't see those under Unihan in Pleco but it's possible that there's another dictionary setting somewhere that I've neglected to turn on.) Would it be possible at some point to just unify these under a single setting ("List Variant Forms") and perhaps implement mapping so that entries for 國 show up alongside dedicated entries for 圀? The Unihan/Pleco/CC dictionaries already have all the data; it just isn't as immediately usable for this (niche, low-priority) purpose.

 

[mikelove]

The display part of this should be supported in 4.0 without our doing anything specifically to enable it, actually; at least in the current prototype, the new entry output formatting system is quite flexible and can easily be configured to append the contents of multiple fields one after another without anything in between them. So you'd simply set up a presentation block with all of those various Unihan fields one after another and then you'd end up with the full list of characters in one spot.

For searching multiple related characters, we do support this too (same code we use so that color gives you colour and vice versa) and had been planning to put in some sort of an 'include character variants' synonym map; I'm not sure if it would be all that efficient to fetch it from Unihan directly but we'd probably base it on the same data (and it's not like it changes that often...) and you could load your own custom synonym map if you didn't like ours.

 

[jurgen85]

Open Newest Image
Still OCR “Reopen Last Image” is great, and something like “Open Newest Image” would be even greater, to get the most recent file from somewhere like /sdcard/Pictures/*/ as this would make opening screenshots very smooth.

 

[Mister_Freeze]

Hello!

I've been looking for an answer to this, but haven't come up with one. Maybe it's a feature request, or just a cry for help?

For adding to flashcards, is there a way to add directly to a category from the search results? rather than having to go and organize it later? Now, I understand you can long hold the + in an individual entry, which will allow you to select a category to file it in, which then becomes the default category in the "add to flashcards" function. (I think this is a silly behavior, but understand it's usefulness in some situations. I think being able to toggle this function would be good.)

I personally would prefer to be always prompted on which category to add to every time I add a flash card.

Thanks!

 

[mikelove]

Open Newest Image
Still OCR “Reopen Last Image” is great, and something like “Open Newest Image” would be even greater, to get the most recent file from somewhere like /sdcard/Pictures/*/ as this would make opening screenshots very smooth.

Makes sense, just have to investigate whether we can actually do it with all of the changes currently underway in Android shared file storage (the long-simmering "Scoped Storage" project).

For adding to flashcards, is there a way to add directly to a category from the search results?

Not at the moment - hardly anybody uses that, to be honest (most people don't seem to be aware of tap-hold context menus at all) so it's not something we've had much feedback on. We do offer an option in Settings / Flashcards to turn off the behavior of tap-hold changing the default - "Change on tap-hold". But certainly can reconsider in future releases.

 

[BenJackson]

Ah, I see. That would probably require commissioning a calligrapher to do them for us one at a time, though, so might be a bit of a lift.

I bought an interesting kit, pictured here:

https://imgur.com/a/74XLHND

. Ever since I got it, I've wished that its "digital" decompositions were available inside Pleco. I wonder if the maker would license that info?

 

[jurgen85]

List columns

There's often a lot of underutilized white space in lists. I imagine something like this:

 

[mikelove]

Ever since I got it, I've wished that its "digital" decompositions were available inside Pleco. I wonder if the maker would license that info?

This is a neat concept but to be honest I'm not sure if it's something that benefits much from integration with Pleco; feels like one could get most of the benefits from it in a standalone app.

List columns

There's often a lot of underutilized white space in lists. I imagine something like this:

Maybe as an option, but to be honest I'm worried this might actually come across are more cluttered (when we're already kind of problematic in that area) - whitespace is a good thing if it helps establish a clear visual hierarchy, all the important now that we're not using textures and shadows anymore and there's so little other visual differentiation to go on.

 

[jurgen85]

Maybe as an option, but to be honest I'm worried this might actually come across are more cluttered (when we're already kind of problematic in that area) - whitespace is a good thing if it helps establish a clear visual hierarchy, all the important now that we're not using textures and shadows anymore and there's so little other visual differentiation to go on.

The hierarchy can already be strengthened in other ways using size, bold, color, etc.

Some new possible ways to reduce the clutter:

• Add space between unrelated items.
• Remove space between related items, in this case the headword and definition lines.
• Use a more powerful color for the separator line.

before: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . after:

 

[Weyland]

The hierarchy can already be strengthened in other ways using size, bold, color, etc.

Some new possible ways to reduce the clutter:

• Add space between unrelated items.
• Remove space between related items, in this case the headword and definition lines.
• Use a more powerful color for the separator line.

before: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . after:
View attachment 3241 View attachment 3242

Why does this image look so washed out? As if being red-green colourblind. (Are you?)

This is what I get to see on stock android;

 

[jurgen85]

Why does this image look so washed out? As if being red-green colourblind. (Are you?)

This is what I get to see on stock android;

Here it's probably because I set the MDBG colors hīgh rísíng lǒw fàllìng, and also darkened them a bit, yellow is quite hard to get right. In the picture there are only two low tones in total, 法 and 口, which is why it would look colorblind. Finally I have tone color on the pinyin which also removes some contrast.

 

[jurgen85]

Full tone for tone+toneless words

In addition to the previous suggestion of dots below to indicate tone sandhi,
for two-syllable tone+toneless words,
it would be useful to indicate neutral tone by adding a tone mark rather than removing one.
The ring ̊ / ̥ is used / in the Taiwanese tongyong pinyin to indicate neutral tone
and in IPA for voicelessness which can be seen as analogous.

E.g. 眼睛 could be yǎnjī̥ng instead of yǎnjing,
to remove the need to look up 睛 jīng individually,
and immediately contrast clearly with 眼镜 yǎnjìng.

This would however get tricky to automate for some multiple reading characters
like 商量 shāngliḁ́ng (i.e. not with 量 liàng),
and also China/Taiwan differences like 认识, rènshí̥ and rènshì, respectively.

 

[mikelove]

To be honest, since the dots below are not a widely used convention I'd be reluctant to add them - we already get enough grief about the //s indicating splittable verbs in PLC.

However, it should be possible to configure 4.0 to match characters in breakdowns regardless of tone, which would let you at least ensure that your breakdown for 眼睛 would include every pronunciation of 睛.

 

[Peter]

Fix these reported errors in the experimental Kai stroke order dataset:
https://github.com/skishore/makemeahanzi/issues/55
https://github.com/skishore/makemeahanzi/issues/72

 

[mikelove]

Well that doesn't have to wait for 4.0, but yes

 

[Peter]

Fantastic!

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1235050880363384832

 

[jurgen85]

Merge landscape toolbars

There is a lot of precious but wasted space in landscape mode that could be made more compact by merging the toolbars.

Before:

After:

 

[mikelove]

That's fair, but to be honest we're actually debating getting rid of landscape support entirely on phones, or at least strongly discouraging it. The evolution of mobile form factors the last few years has made landscape oriented phones increasingly awkward for basically anything but games -screens are too wide for comfortable text reading in one column and yet too squat / hindered-by-extra-bars-and-safe-areas-on-the-top-and-bottom to be efficient for two columns.

So I'm reluctant to put any time into optimizations around landscape until hardware starts moving back in a landscape-friendly direction. (which could well happen after everybody moves over more confidently to all-screen designs and pulls back to less aggressive aspect ratios, just hasn't happened yet)

 

[jurgen85]

You're right, landscape is really a pain in most circumstances and I rarely use it, but for the few cases where I do it would be nice to mitigate its inherent flaws.

If landscape is going anyway, I think portrait could benefit from this as well, although you might need to get a bit creative. Chinese characters are compact, but to be more pedagogical, they could be spelled out in English unless scrolled down past the headword section.

before: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . after: