Pleco questions and thoughts

[trisha2766]

I recently got an iPhone and installed the free version of Pleco. I really like it so far and am considering some paid add-ons but would like to get a little feedback first.

I am especially interested in the OCR thing. I think it would help with reading books. I plan to try it out tonight after my 3 yr old is asleep. I'm a little concerned about whether or not it will work well with some of the children's books I want to read to her as they have a tendency to use rather silly, whimsical looking fonts that are hard to read. It should be fine for the Magic Treehouse, Goosebumps and Harry potter books I have although it may be a while before I get to them.

It would seem logical to get the flash card add-on - I don't use any other electronIc flash cards and adding new characters that I find with the OCR thing to flash cards would make sense. (although I have some 6000 index card flash cards already made that I still want to make use of).

I'm not sure if it would be worth it to go ahead and get one of the bundles or not. Right now I could probably only afford the basic one. The other add-ons I would probably use sooner or later.

The dictionaries are where I can't make up my mind. I really shouldn't spend the money on the bigger bundles, but maybe in the future I could. Does anyone know if you can upgrade to the bigger bundles and just pay the difference in cost or do you have to then pay for the full cost?

That might be a good compromise for now. Maybe by the time I get to the point where the free dictionaries don't have all the characters/words I need I will be able to upgrade to a bigger bundle.

[icebear]

Does anyone know if you can upgrade to the bigger bundles and just pay the difference in cost or do you have to then pay for the full cost?

Pretty sure this isn't possible, due to a Apple AppStore policy. Nonetheless, I think at least the flashcard addon, and perhaps OCR and pronunciations, is well worth the investment.

[Silent]

I am especially interested in the OCR thing. I think it would help with reading books. I plan to try it out tonight after my 3 yr old is asleep. I'm a little concerned about whether or not it will work well with some of the children's books I want to read to her as they have a tendency to use rather silly, whimsical looking fonts that are hard to read. It should be fine for the Magic Treehouse, Goosebumps and Harry potter books I have although it may be a while before I get to them.

As a new user of the trial version I'ld say the OCR application works, but is less convenient then hoped/expected. Using it on a book has been a pain so far. There's always some shake of the phone and/or book, pages tend not to be perfectly flat and light conditions often are not perfect too. As a result it can be time consuming and fails regularly, specially with more complex characters. Off course performance may be hugely improved by good light, and a stable environment (sit at a table with plenty of light, the book at the table surface and holding the phone with two hands). Also practice may improve things. I feel however that often the handwriting tool is faster/more convenient (While I have only very limited knowledge of strokeorder)

With this experience in mind I would be surprised if it works well on all kind of elaborate fonts used in childrenbooks. So I'ld say try before you buy!

Also if money is really an issue, maybe look for some free alternatives. Anki is a free flashcard program that works great. I think there are also free OCR applications. Sure, intregration is less optimal, but with the option to add words to the flashcards made so easy it may be very hard to restrain yourself in the number of cards added and/or to add the most usefull words instead of the first unkown ones you encounter. The convenience of integration may backfire.

[icebear]

I feel however that often the handwriting tool is faster/more convenient (While I have only very limited knowledge of strokeorder)

Strongly agree with this point.

[Manuel]

I feel however that often the handwriting tool is faster/more convenient (While I have only very limited knowledge of strokeorder)

I am still running Pleco on my Palm Zire72 so no OCR, but my classmate has Pleco on Android and, while he was very excited about OCR at the beginning, I've noticed he doesn't use it anymore. Yesterday he was looking up a character and he directly input it using handwriting. Incidentally, is the handwriting module strictly necessary? If you buy your phone in China it already comes with handwriting input (which is what my classmate uses).

Regarding stroke order, AFIK the handwriging recognition usually does a pretty good job even if you don't draw the strokes in the correct order. For instance, I just wrote '是‘ in Pleco with completely wrong stroke order and it still came up first in the list. I eve wrote the character starting from the last stroke and working my way backwards to the first stroke and '是' still came up in the match list. Vretty neat!

[trisha2766]

I thought maybe I was asking a stupid question about the upgrading, that it would be obvious that you wouldn't have to pay the full price when you upgrade. I'll wait until I find out for certain about that before I buy anything except maybe the OCR.

I'm still planning to try out the OCR tonight and test it out. Does anyone know how long the trial lasts or how many scans you can do or whatever?

I'm not in china but my phone does have a built in thing for writing characters and it does seem to work pretty well with Pleco. I used to always use the writing character thing at nciku and I noticed that you don't necessarily need to get all the strokes in the right order for it to work ok.

Still it seems such a pain to me to have to write /draw in the character. Very time consuming when reading.

[Silent]

Does anyone know how long the trial lasts or how many scans you can do or whatever?

AFAIK it will keep working indefinately however only the pinyin is given. The paid version will give the translation too.

[character]

I am especially interested in the OCR thing. I think it would help with reading books. I plan to try it out tonight after my 3 yr old is asleep. I'm a little concerned about whether or not it will work well with some of the children's books I want to read to her as they have a tendency to use rather silly, whimsical looking fonts that are hard to read. It should be fine for the Magic Treehouse, Goosebumps and Harry potter books I have although it may be a while before I get to them.

You're right that it does not always handle fancy fonts very well. The other issue is that OCR isn't suited to trying to look up words when reading to a child, if that was your plan. OCR needs good lighting and it can take time to start up OCR and locate the word with the camera. It would quickly become frustrating for both of you. If OCR can read the font, then you could capture the text into Pleco ahead of time (may need the document reader add on) and read from that instead.

I'm not sure if it would be worth it to go ahead and get one of the bundles or not. Right now I could probably only afford the basic one. The other add-ons I would probably use sooner or later.

The basic bundle + OCR is a good deal. There are also free dictionaries available.

[mikelove]

Heh, always lovely to wake up and find a newly posted thread about your company's product that already has half a dozen well-informed replies :-)

Does anyone know if you can upgrade to the bigger bundles and just pay the difference in cost or do you have to then pay for the full cost?

Not on iOS, sadly, as a few other people have already said. We wish that weren't the case - we do offer that option quite happily on Android - but basically, Apple's store doesn't allow for user-specific discounts (both by design and as a matter of policy) and our agreement with Apple precludes us from selling our iOS software through any other channel.

We are, however, planning to decouple discounted dictionaries from discounted non-dictionary add-ons in our next big update - there'll be only one or two real "bundles" (one that's more-or-less equivalent to the current Basic bundle and one to the Professional) plus a variety of "dictionary packs" that will let you add on several dictionaries at a discounted price without also paying again for things like flashcards / handwriting / etc. So while that won't completely help in your case, it will at least give you a way to get a price break on dictionaries after your first purchase.

As a new user of the trial version I'ld say the OCR application works, but is less convenient then hoped/expected. Using it on a book has been a pain so far. There's always some shake of the phone and/or book, pages tend not to be perfectly flat and light conditions often are not perfect too. As a result it can be time consuming and fails regularly, specially with more complex characters. Off course performance may be hugely improved by good light, and a stable environment (sit at a table with plenty of light, the book at the table surface and holding the phone with two hands). Also practice may improve things. I feel however that often the handwriting tool is faster/more convenient (While I have only very limited knowledge of strokeorder)

That's not an uncommon response to OCR, actually - the people who use it long-term tend to end up working with still images more than live video (much more stable / usable, really), which is why we're focusing a lot of our future development efforts on those; we just added PDF reading to our development version, for example, which works extremely well and probably should have been included in our first OCR release.

Live OCR is a great showcase feature, and offering it has done us a tremendous amount of good for the past year-and-a-half (lots of publicity / downloads / etc which in turn made possible a bunch of other neat upcoming stuff), but when we originally started working on OCR we were only planning to use it for still images - the live thing sort of fell into our laps when Apple announced an OS update that suddenly made it possible. We've been surrounding it with warnings / "please try the demo version first" / etc pretty much from day 1; it's the only Add-on which pops up a warning if you try to buy it without having previously downloaded the demo. For some people and in some situations it works incredibly well, and there certainly are users for whom live OCR has become a regular part of their Chinese language toolbox, but it's not for everyone, so it's something you really need to try out for yourself.

Incidentally, is the handwriting module strictly necessary? If you buy your phone in China it already comes with handwriting input (which is what my classmate uses).

It actually comes with that everywhere, at least on iOS - just needs to be turned on first. The benefits to our system are that it's considerably more ergonomic (how Apple expects people to draw fairly complicated characters in a small box at the bottom of the screen, I don't know) and it also tends to be a good bit more accurate - more tolerant of wacky stroke order and such. The gap has narrowed a bit in iOS 5 (Apple's started paying more attention to this due to their success in China) but it's still there - we license our engine from a Chinese company that was making handwriting recognition systems back when Apple was just a beleaguered PC maker.

[trisha2766]

Thanks! At least having some dictionary packs at a discounted price sounds like it would solve the one problem.

I dont plan to use the OCR 'live' when I'm reading to her. What I usually do is read a book ahead of time while she is asleep, look up all the words I don't know, memorize them, practice reading it for some days when she's not around - and then once I can read it somewhat fluidly then I read it to her. So it doesn't have to be that fast. Besides I want her to think I really know this stuff!

I tested it out last night but it was pretty late so I need a little more time with it. What I found out was

1)I pretty much needed both hands on the phone to do it, otherwise I was too shaky. Which can be hard when looking at a book whose pages won't stay open on their own. I always used to use a book stand/holder to read for ergonomic reasons so there is no reason I can't do that again to hold the pages open better. It seemed to be hard scanning when the book was laying flat anyway.

2) yes, having good lighting is important and I usually read this sort of stuff at night when there is no natural light , but again, I usually use a book light in the evening so hopefully that will take care of that problem.

3) it did surprisingly well with the goofy fonts! I actually had a harder time with a Harry potter book because the print was smaller and the pages so thin you can almost see the other side.

I'll test it out better sometime this week when I have more time and am wider awake.

Heres a question about the flash card thing - is it equally as easy to add a word to one from handwriting it as from using OCR?

And I hadn't checked yet, can you make 3 sided cards? Or can I at least go from the character to the pinyin? Usually what's hardest for me to remember is the tones. Can you do the character on one side and somehow have the pinyin and English together? That's how I usually make my index cards. What limitations come with trial version on the flash card add-on?

Thanks!

[character]

I actually had a harder time with a Harry potter book because the print was smaller and the pages so thin you can almost see the other side.

You might try putting a black piece of paper behind the one you are trying to OCR to hide the characters on the other side of the page.

[trisha2766]

Ok I now see that there is no demo version for the flash card add-on.

[mikelove]

Heres a question about the flash card thing - is it equally as easy to add a word to one from handwriting it as from using OCR?

Pretty much - you write in the word you want to look up, tap on it to select it, then tap on the + button.

Yes, in fact they're automatically 3-sided - on any given test you can always select whatever combination you want of characters / pinyin / definition.

Ok I now see that there is no demo version for the flash card add-on.

Not at the moment, no, though there will be in the next big update. (basically just a free version of our flashcard system with some features missing) See the flashcard tutorial for a detailed walkthrough in the meantime.

[trisha2766]

I went ahead and got the basic bundle and OCR.

As far as can tell - please correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that with an iPhone I need to connect my phone to my laptop to be able to import cards? I was going to try and import the npcr cards. Unfortunately the fan went out on my laptop and until my husband has a chance to fix it, I don't have a computer.

Please wish me luck that everything goes ok with replacing the fan and I don't lose my laptop!

[icebear]

I know there's a function in the app that lets you import some common cards from Pleco's website - e.g. HSK, maybe some textbooks, etc, although I remember it being a bit cumbersome to get through the first time. I'd suggest popping the question over at PlecoForums too, they can probably sort you out quickly on those technical points.

[mikelove]

As far as can tell - please correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that with an iPhone I need to connect my phone to my laptop to be able to import cards? I was going to try and import the npcr cards. Unfortunately the fan went out on my laptop and until my husband has a chance to fix it, I don't have a computer.

Go into Settings / Web Browser and you can navigate to any web page with Pleco flashcard lists and get them that way; if you click on a text file in that web browser it'll save it instead of opening it. No need to use your laptop unless the list is already on your laptop.

[trisha2766]

My laptop is running again! That went very well thankfully!

I finally figured out how to get the npcr cards onto my phone. It took a while. Now I just need to get started reviewing!

Thanks for all the help and suggestions!