PLECO 4.0 (conversation about the not-yet-released update)

[艾墨本]

Was searching the forums for discussion on what is likely to be a big change for Pleco and found nothing.

 

I am excited for it particularly because of the many times my questions about flashcard features is "that will be included in the 4.0 update."

 

Well, what are you all looking forward to in the update?

Any questions for @mikelove who is always quick to answer questions?

Does anyone know of a list of features expected to be included in 4.0?

 

Beyond the revamped note cards, I'm hoping for an expansion on thesaurus-type searches. My dream would be a button below "dictionary" that read "thesaurus." Now at the higher levels of Chinese learning, 同义词、近义词、和反义词 are all stubbornly important and I really hate most of the Chinese created dictionaries out there (Youdao!). 

[Tomsima]

Mike's already addressed this over at pleco forums, I'm personally looking forward to planned improvements for zhuyin fuhao, which I use a lot more than pinyin. At the moment the ruby text style bulks out horizontal text in an unusable way, 4.0 sounds like you will be able to have ruby text on any side of the characters, rather than only the right. May be small news for some people, but it's big for me!

[mikelove]

Thesaurus: would be nice but I haven't yet found a title I like enough to license; dropped our previous one because too many words were missing. I suppose in theory we could try to do something ourselves based on overlapping / similar words in English definitions, or just commission someone to write one for us - definitely on our radar but I'm not sure if it'll make it into 4.0 since it's more of a data file than a coding problem and those tend to be handled on a different (and even more annoyingly slow) schedule :-)

 

Ruby text in other places: yep, that one's already implemented.

[mikelove]

(On that note, anybody have any good recommendations for printed Chinese thesauri?)

[Jan Finster]

On 11/20/2017 at 5:56 AM, mikelove said:

(On that note, anybody have any good recommendations for printed Chinese thesauri?)

 

Has there been any new developments regarding thesauri for Pleco or did anyone find a decent online thesaurus?

[carlo]

Many years ago I found a free online text version of 同义词词林 and saved it to my Pleco folder. I also still have a printed book version that I purchased >15 years ago in the second-hand section of one of the bookshops in Fuzhou Lu in Shanghai (古文书店？ can't remember).

 

I've noticed this. It looks it might contain an updated version of my old text file, you might want to take a look.

[roddy]

I'm framing this as a feature suggestion, although I'm not going to be floored with shock if someone points out it's easily achievable already, and has been since Palm Pilot days - some kind of comparison view for when you want to figure out how the use of two very similar terms differ, or have two similar characters side by side. I've been using the split-screen function on my ipad quite a bit lately, and often find myself using Pleco and wishing I could have another instance of Pleco running....

[mungouk]

Apparently this works for some apps... https://www.cultofmac.com/629606/ipados-app-windows/

 

 

[roddy]

Ah, nice - doesn't work for all apps, and not Pleco (maybe only Apple ones?), but useful.

[mikelove]

Yeah, support for that iPad multi-instance mode is on a long list of Stuff That We Really Didn't Want To Implement Twice In Our Old And New Apps, but it should be supported in 4.0 at whatever point hopefully at least a few years prior to the heat death of the sun that finally comes out.

[roddy]

I'm wondering if some kind of indicator a character has multiple pronunciations might be useful. Maybe not for advanced students, but if you're starting out and running through flashcards, it might be useful to know that while 和 is he2 in 和好 and 和, it isn't always the case and you need to watch out when you see, say, 附和. 

 

Not sure though - might not be necessary to know about every obscure alternative pronunciation. 

[mikelove]

I don't know if we'd ship something like this as a built-in / check-a-box type thing, but the text formatting system in 4.0 is sufficiently flexible that you could easily create a rule to attach some sort of additional styling to characters with multiple pronunciations if you wanted to. You'd want to use your own list rather than relying on anything from a dictionary search, since we have a LOT of obscure pronunciations, but it'd be easy enough to work out the few hundred characters with the most common / useful alternate readings and then build your rule around that list.

 

Of course if this proved popular / generated a lot of feature requests we could always make our own list and built it in, we're just trying to be fairly conservative in the first release - part of the benefit of making things so customizable is that we can get away with doing less ourselves ?

[xinoxanu]

Posting here because I couldn't find a better thread.

 

@mikelove, a couple things related to the reader, if I may:

 

• I am having issues with the reader on Pleco 3.2.75 for Android: whenever I open my last opened book it doesn't go back to the last page I read. Most of the time it takes me back to the start of the book, so I am forced to go to my bookmarks or manually search for the page. Happens with both .txt and .epub files and both on my S8 and a Lenovo Tablet running Pie.
• In Android as well, could we get another widget/shortcut specifically made for the reader? The one that exists now is for the Clip Reader as a whole, meaning that if I've recently been copy-pasting stuff onto Pleco, when I click on the Clip Reader shortcut it won't take me to the last book I was reading, but to the last thing I copied. It's not a big deal because it's only a couple clicks away, but it'd be nice if we could just jump straight to reading without having to deal with the clip reader or, in case of using the main app and no shortcuts, having to close the keyboard first, click a few tabs and so on.

Thanks Mike!

[mikelove]

3.2.75: thanks, will check. (this is a beta and we're testing a new feature which actually entails intentionally *not* saving the last location in some cases, in order to prevent the annoying scenario where you rotate the screen and then rotate it back and it's magically jumped a page forward or backward because when when it mapped locations between orientations twice it ended up on a different page)

 

Shortcut: we do have a dedicated Reader shortcut option for the tap-hold menu (you can customize that in Settings), to be honest we thought those were kind of replacing the old shortcut icons for most users (particularly after Google made it impossible to create shortcut icons from within the app / forced users to add them from the widget screen) but if there's a reason the icons are still useful took we can certainly consider adding one for it.

[xinoxanu]

40 minutes ago, mikelove said:

we do have a dedicated Reader shortcut option for the tap-hold menu (you can customize that in Settings)

 

Oops! I wasn't even aware this was a thing since I never use those 3d-touch kind of context menus! Anyway: I tried the "Last Reader File" shortcut but it opens up some encoding options. Which one should I choose for the functionality I was mentioning?

 

Also, is 3.2.75 actually a beta version? That's odd to hear because I am not currently enrolled in the beta on the Play Store, so shouldn't I just have the latest stable version?

[mikelove]

Sorry, got my numbers mixed up - 3.2.76 is the beta version, so I don't know what's going on with yours. Do your bookmarks disappear when this happens too?

 

Last Reader File should be showing you the last file opened, yes - the fact that it's showing you an encoding prompt instead suggests that your entire bookmark data file (which also holds encodings + last locations) might be disappearing for some reason. Is there any sort of file cleaner app installed on either device that you could disable?

[xinoxanu]

No, they don't disappear. Or at least when I click on the bookmark icon they are all there.

 

I have Files by Google but I rarely use it. Either way I always keep Pleco's cache intact, so that shouldn't be an issue.

[mikelove]

Hmm, that's odd then... what if you, say, open a document, scroll to a page, then immediately put Pleco in the background, terminate it, and reopen - does the file return to the correct location in that case?

 

With Last Reader File, if the last file opened is an EPUB do you still see that encoding prompt?

[xinoxanu]

15 minutes ago, mikelove said:

what if you, say, open a document, scroll to a page, then immediately put Pleco in the background, terminate it, and reopen - does the file return to the correct location in that case?

 

Just tried it and no, it goes back to the start of the book. If the app is not terminated and stays open in the background then it seems that whenever I go to the reader it will remember the last position without issues.

 

Does this have to do with Android permissions perhaps? Pleco has never asked for storage permission so it's not ticked on Android Settings. Should I grant it?

 

16 minutes ago, mikelove said:

With Last Reader File, if the last file opened is an EPUB do you still see that encoding prompt?

 

I just selected UTF-8 to try to get rid of the encoding prompt. Terminated the app and now when I use the Last Reader File shortcut it just displays two letters: "PK". Edit: same if I choose GB or other options.

[mikelove]

Shouldn't have anything to do with permissions, no - it's the same file access as with bookmarks, so if bookmarks are saving there's no reason the last document location shouldn't as well.

 

So to confirm, you can successfully open a document, scroll to a page, bookmark, it, put Pleco in the background, terminate, reopen, and jump to that bookmark?

 

PK -> it's interpreting the EPUB as a text file (PK always appears at the start of an EPUB file since they're actually Zip files). So that should at least be a pretty easy/obvious one to fix - somehow it's getting confused about the file type when reopening the last file.