Writing recognition

[manisdogfish]

While looking over the Pleco website again, I noticed that the writing recognition window was opened on top of the main windown at the bottom of the screen and not a completely different window (http://www.pleco.com/pleco2.html). Is this possible to do? If so, that would be so awesome!

The capabilities and functions of Pleco overwhelm me. I'm wondering if there is video tutorial or something very user-friendly I can get my hands on. I looked over the online manual, but its not so user friendly.

Also, it seems that I need to buy more dictionaries now. I originally bought the $99 prof. package which I love, but now I need more Is is possible to just pay another $50 or $100 to upgrade to the next dictionary package (Linguist/Complete)? I'm just trying to find the most economical way. I'm interested in getting the 现代汉语规范词典, C&T English-Chinese Business Lexicon, and a few others would be nice. It seems the best way (if its possible) would be to just upgrade to the Complete package. Would that be right?

Sorry for the all the questions, but I couldn't wait any longer to ask

Thanks

Alex

 

[mikelove]

Yes - just go to the Layout panel of Preferences and set "Input palette location" to "Bottom" along with checking the box for "Fullscreen handwriting palette" - that'll give you that sort of handwriting interface.

We were meaning to do video tutorials for 2.0 but got too caught up in the iPhone version to find the time to record them - hopefully we'll get around to that with 2.1, though. The manual could definitely use an expansion / hints-and-tips section, too, or perhaps a wiki component of some kind.

Email me at mikelove@pleco.com and we can talk about upgrade options - we have recently started offering an upgrade path to Complete that doesn't involve buying every missing dictionary individually.

 

[manisdogfish]

O. my. gosh. That full screen handwriting palette is too cool. I should ask questions here more often. Wow, I'm blown away. Almost too easy. Thanks so much for your help.

Alex

 

[manisdogfish]

Maybe this is a silly question, but I'm just gonna throw it out there anyways. Are there any other ingenious less known features that most people don't know about that you want to let me know? Apologize for the ambiguity, but can't help but ask..

Alex

 

[mikelove]

Few things that come to mind:

-- Tone coloring: accessible through the Misc panel in Preferences.
-- Pop-up definitions: highlight a word in a dictionary entry, tap-hold on the highlighted text and select "Pop-up Defn" to view its definition in a popup window.
-- Different layouts / toolbar settings in landscape orientation (extremely useful for people with slide-out keyboard HTC phones); accessible through Toolbar and Layout in Preferences.
-- Instant Access: enable the "from taskbar icon" in the External panel in Preferences and you'll get a little Pleco icon at the top of the screen which you can tap on to pop up a definition for a highlighted Chinese word in Internet Explorer / SMS / etc.

There are a ton of these in flashcards too, just depends on what you're trying to do with them.

 

[manisdogfish]

I'm wondering why the full screen writing recognition tool lags compared to switching to the other screen by pressing 入..

 

[mikelove]

How do you mean that it lags? Is it slow when you start drawing the first stroke, when you start drawing any stroke, while you're moving the pen, or just in general opening / closing it?

 

[manisdogfish]

When I write the first 1 or 2 characters its fine, but after that the lag is really bad and I'm almost unable to write anything.

 

[mikelove]

Hmm... does this happen only if you're adding additional characters to a query (i.e., you've already written a few characters to look up and are now writing another one to go on the end of them), or does it also happen if you clear the input and start entering a new word? If you close / reopen the handwriting input panel by tapping on the "ru" button, does that get the lag to go away? What about if you disable / re-enable it with ON/OFF?

 

[W.Pietsch]

Dear "to whom it may concern",

Just one question.

It seems that Pleco does not recognise all radicals neither in the dictionary nor in the flashcard mode. (I expected to find something in this forum... The only answer, which I found, seemed to be related to it but not very promising...)

Thank you for your support in advance.


Best regards
Wolfgang

 

[mikelove]

Are you referring to handwriting recogniton or simple text display?

The handwriting recognizer doesn't recognize every radical, no - many of them are quite obscure by themselves (and couldn't even be encoded / displayed on computers until recently) so the company we licensed the recognizer from didn't include them in its database. But why are you trying to look up radicals with handwriting? Wouldn't it be faster to just scroll through your radical dictionary / flashcards for the right radical?

Our built-in font file displays most radical characters, but not all - we're actually just about to replace it with another font that supports them all, and in the meantime there are lots of instructions here for replacing it with another font.

 

[W.Pietsch]

Dear Mike,

Thank you for your prompt reaction.

This concern is related to the handwriting recognition only.

The radicals' list picture them without problem and they are found too, when you copy them into the input.

You are right, there are several ways to work with, really nice ones. But for example, testing yourself in the flashcard headword mode and having drawn them correctly, you can't make the right choice at all. (You may reproduce it with the dog 犭and heart 忄variants)

Isolde's radicals' dictionary and flashcards as well as the sun-extA font is installed and works well as far as I see and make no difference with respect to what we are discussing.

Once again, thank you for your support.


And best regards
Wolfgang

 

[mikelove]

Interesting... perhaps it would make sense for us to add a radical input option for flashcard character test too. Though probably only as an option since some people might consider it too much of a giveaway.

 

[Stephen Selby]

I have installed Pleco on my new HTC HD2. All works well. I have a choice of using the HD2's excellent Chinese handwriting recognition or Pleco's native one. On Pleco's, I find that the response is not very good and the lines are too thin. Can I tweak the line thickness/colour? Also can I make it truly 'full-screen' rather than trying to fit the character into the elongated vertical box on the left of the word-list?

 

[mikelove]

The poor response rate is probably happening because you've got a visible scrollbar on the screen - if you turn on the "Attempt to disable TouchFlo in fullscreen" option in Preferences / Input, that might help with it, but the best bet is to disable the HTC's TouchFlo scrolling feature altogether; do an internet search and you should be able to find lots of help with that. (it's a registry hack - don't remember it off the top of my head - though some versions of HTC phones also include a tweaks control panel to let you turn it off more easily)

As far as making it completely fullscreen, there's no option for that at the moment - the best bet would probably be to use the separate handwriting input dialog, since that both avoids the scrollbar problem and gives you a larger area to draw in. You could try moving the word list to the bottom of the screen instead of the side, though - tap-hold on the "biao" button at the top right corner of the screen and select "Bottom" for that. (or hide the list altogether by just tapping on that button)

 

[Stephen Selby]

That mostly worked - especially the full screen, which is pretty good now. I realized when you mentioned the registry hack that I had already done one to make it less sensitive, because it was always launching apps when I was flicking the screen flow. So it's probably my fault.

Anything on making the pen strokes thicker during input?

 

[mikelove]

No fix for that right now, but we could certainly try adding a thicker line option in a future release - I'm a bit nervous that that might affect responsiveness, though, we don't have access to the sorts of graphical acceleration tools that HTC does.