[Unofficial] Feature Request / Suggestion List

[jurgen85]

Speaking of ridiculous, there are even more pitfalls:

1. Tabular and half-width glyphs are not necessarily the same width. (e.g. Source Han has slightly wider tabulars, defeating the purpose)

2. The half width feature (hwid) affects punctuation as well, so the font would need to be modified.

 

[mikelove]

True on #1, but I'm not necessarily convinced of the need to go strictly half-width here - I've never really seen a clear benefit to that (it doesn't magically make your characters line up unless you happen to have an even number of digits), and frankly in a mixed Chinese/Latin setting I'm inclined to think it's more important to stick with the same font for Latin everywhere. Particularly since we also often end up with embedded Latin text in Chinese entries - it'd be weird for example to look up a Chinese word for a particular city name and have the English name for it appear in one font in the English definition and a totally different font in the Chinese definition. Let alone, say, chemical formulas or romanized Sanskrit, for which it would be next to impossible to even find a font with monospaced precisely-half-width characters.

With #2 we can easily apply features to some characters and not others, we'd just set up a text formatter to match digits and apply a particular font variant span to them. So if you disagree with the above paragraph, it should be possible to get precisely half-width digits assuming you can find a font you like for them.

 

[jurgen85]

Your point about the Latin alphabet makes sense, but I'm really only interested in the digits here.

Odd amounts of digits could be aligned in another way. The simplest might be a regex that adds U+2005 around them.

As for the legit Latin text in Chinese dictionaries: Chinese in English defintions switches to Chinese. Could not the inverse also be done?

Can chemical formulas also be easily matched by a pattern? (btw in 赤铁矿 Fe2O3 becomes interpreted as pinyin Fé'Ǒ so this might indeed benefit from a more general solution.)

 

[mikelove]

Fair enough, but for the overall type design I have to think about both.

You can certainly switch between English and Chinese in definitions, my point is that if you do that with Latin text (or chemical formulas, or Sanskrit) you either wreck your careful perfect-em-multiple spacing or you have to print it as ugly fullwidth (or halfwidth) text (if you even have a font that covers the correct characters) which doesn't match at all with the Latin text elsewhere on the screen; far more noticeable for words than for numbers.

 

[jurgen85]

Absolutely, I understand that, but I accept that the same way I accept that foreign writing systems don't have the same x-height (because they don't have any "x" to begin with), baseline, stroke width, etc. Aligning that would be way more complicated to implement.

The reason I care about the digits is that since they are so common, each writing system eventually adopts them as basically native, and styles them to match, which is why we talk of Latin rather than Arabic (or even Indian) digits, and why old-style vs lining is a thing in Latin script (because it has cases). It's impossible to read a Chinese newspaper without encountering a few digits (usually dates or larger amounts), while the Latin alphabet (like any other foreign ones) is much rarer. The same goes for definitions, and I basically only encounter Latin there as clarifying pinyin or the occasional name.

 

[mikelove]

That's perfectly reasonable for Chinese text in newspapers and such - places where you're only seeing Chinese - but it's not generally what text looks like in our app for most users, so it's not what I'm inclined to orient our design around.

But again, you should be able to get this working exactly the way you want with customization.

 

[adamsherinian]

I would find it very useful if Pleco would be able to work with a (Standard Taiwanese) Hokkien dictionary in the same way that it works with Cantonese and Mandarin dictionaries: full integration with search, dictionary groups, and with miscellaneous settings such as tone colours, TTS (if you can find it) and a large database of sentences (such as with the Words.HK dictionary in Cantonese). Perhaps integrating one of the many Hokkien dictionaries online?

 

[mikelove]

A lot of those are under noncommercial licenses, so we can't really integrate them ourselves, all we can do is provide tools for people to create user databases out of them. That at least should be easier in 4.0 though.

 

[jurgen85]

Reader popup precision selection

If I want to look up a single character that is part of a compound word, I need to mess with the arrow buttons. I imagine tapping a character inside the current selection to select only that character.

 

[mikelove]

The problem there is that in some contexts now / more contexts in the future you can drag the start or end of a selection to move it, and there isn't really any good way to support tapping on single characters while also supporting that gesture.

 

[jurgen85]

What's the process for updating free dictionaries like HanDeDict? It looks like it was last updated in 2017, and if my quick math on their changelog is correct, it has had almost 16,000 changes since.

 

[mikelove]

No particular process, HanDeDict is just a bit tricky to update because there isn't an automatic way to map entry IDs from our current version to the new one so we're not inclined to put in the time to do that until after 4.0 is ready.

 

[Peter]

When READER I sometimes encounter confusing sentences or phrase constructions. I want an efficient way to capture them for revision later.

I would love the ability to underline one or more characters. A squigly line would do.
Changing the color would be useful. Red, Green, Blue.
Associating a text comment with the underline not essential.

 

[jurgen85]

I'm getting quite excited about the regex stuff mentioned earlier. How will it handle links and other formatting? Will we be able to shorten measure words from e.g.

M: ge / míng / ²wèi / 个 / 名 / 位

to e.g.

M: 个 名 位

and keep the links?

 

[mikelove]

When READER I sometimes encounter confusing sentences or phrase constructions. I want an efficient way to capture them for revision later.

I would love the ability to underline one or more characters. A squigly line would do.
Changing the color would be useful. Red, Green, Blue.
Associating a text comment with the underline not essential.

Already implemented for 4.0, with text comments. Currently uses background colors instead of underlines but it'd be easy enough to add underline support if that's not in the initial release.

I'm getting quite excited about the regex stuff mentioned earlier. How will it handle links and other formatting? Will we be able to shorten measure words from e.g.
to e.g. and keep the links?

Should be possible, yes - entries emerge from our dictionary databases as Markdown before we turn them into rich text.

 

[Peter]

Already implemented for 4.0, with text comments.

Feeling "giddy".

 

[mikelove]

Not the prettiest / showiest feature but here are screenshots:

 

[Weyland]

Due to having an abundance of dictionaries the top search results are rarely the most common words. It would be nice if I could make it so that the top search results could be the entries I have saved in my flashcards. Or have a "search flashcards" only mode.

Also, could the tags be shown in the preview? Something like this or have it so we can make 3 character long tags to show up in the preview.

 

[Shun]

Hi Weyland,

you can do something like this using the Flashcard Priority Search feature of Pleco 3.2. I quote from the manual:

Dictionary

iphone.pleco.com

“Flashcard Priority Search
This is slow and slightly experimental, but if you prefix a Chinese-English search in Pleco with a ‘!’ character, entries that appear in flashcards will sorted to the top of the result list; this is particularly useful if you want to find a list of flashcards containing a particular word. (we plan to expand on this function greatly in future releases) Entries in your currently selected default flashcard category will come up before other entries in flashcards, so you can use this specifically as a category filter too.”

I don't know about tags in the preview, they may be coming with Pleco 4.0.

Cheers, Shun

 

[jurgen85]

Erhua variants inclusion

Where erhua is meaningless, there are usually links to the definition with/without 儿, but if the erhua definitions are different (and thus would indeed benefit from that link) the link is instead missing. (see e.g. 盘 or 沿 in ABC)

Suggestion 1: add such links.

Suggestion 2: even better would be to include the full definitions of the differing erhua variants with the "main" ones, just like other reading variants are when opened from a popup bubble. (e.g. 妻子 or 告诉)