CHARS feature: rich associations no longer accessible?

L

LinZheFu

进士
As I struggle with the new update, one challenge I'm facing involves the CHARS feature. In the CHARS function for a selected word, I used to be able to click on a component and see a list of words using that component. Now it just takes me to the dictionary entry for the component. I can then use CHAR again to see words with that full word in it, but many of the rich associations I used to be able to see are not accessible. When the component is a radical, clicking on it takes me to a dictionary page that simply states it is a radical. Won't show any words. I used to get a lot more information and it was cool, convenient, and friendly. A real wow. That seems largely gone now. Possible to get it back?

Also, when related words do show up, many of them are missing the character and just show a box with an X in it. How do I get those characters to display like they used to?
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Sorry, not quite sure which "rich associations" you're talking about - if you're not seeing some characters that you used to see before, go into Settings / Definition Screen and turn on "use older data" - that will use the old CHARS data set instead of the new one.

What information did you used to get about radicals that you're not getting now? Perhaps you're missing a dictionary that you had before - we certainly haven't taken anything away in that area.

Download the "Extended Chinese Font" from the "Free" section of Add-ons to fix those [X]ed characters.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Eek, somehow this managed to escape our notice in beta-testing (though now that I think about it somebody may have mentioned it and we may have overlooked their comment) but I just realized that you're talking about the "Components" section in CHARS going to DICT rather than to another CHARS. Which is not how it's supposed to work, and not how it does work in our iOS app - compounds bring you to DICT but components bring you to CHARS so that you can see which other characters use them.

Anyway, we'll make sure this gets fixed in 3.1.3 - thanks for bringing it to our attention.
 
L

LinZheFu

进士
The extended Chinese font did not solve the problem of many characters appearing as boxes with an X. Still have that. Restarted the table to check - problem still there.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Hmm... are you using a custom Chinese font in place of our built-in one? Perhaps that font is missing CJK Extension A - our "Extended Font" only covers B/C/D since A is included in the built-in one.
 
L

LinZheFu

进士
Before the last update, characters displayed well, as I recall - but I may not remember that correctly. Now I get many boxes with Xs. For example, looking at CHARS for the characters in 奉安, under 奉 starting with beng4 meaning "smoke and dust everywhere," there is a string of 5 box+Xs, followed by a properly displayed series of rare characters and under 安 there is a string of 9 box+Xs beginning with the character wen3 (variant of 稳), and then come a string of rare or Cantonese characters that are displayed properly, such as beng4, a classifier for odors. I'm guessing the last sections are the rare characters from the extended dictionary. The section right before that is where the display fails. Any ideas?
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
That means that the custom font you're using doesn't support Unicode Extension A properly (code points 3400-4dff) - the built-in fonts do, as does Google's DroidSansFallbackFull, and lots of other fonts do as well - many of them will be identitied as "GB18030" fonts.
 
L

LinZheFu

进士
Does anyone here know how to install new Chinese fonts or the DroidSansFallbackFull on the Samsung 10.1 tablet? The Google Play Store search results don't look promising - nothing specific, just apps that have too many poor ratings for me to trust. Googling for other guidance has not produced anything helpful.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Pleco uses its own fonts, so there would only be problems if you customized those, in which case you can remove that customization by going into Settings / Fonts / Custom fonts and tapping "Reset Font" under Chinese.

If that doesn't work, that suggests that there's a problem in your Samsung tablet's firmware - could you possibly post a screenshot? It may be that it's overriding our font choices at a low level and injecting its own inferior fonts (we've also seen Samsung do this recently with the icons in the sidebar, with rather silly results) - unfortunately, in that case the only workaround would be to install a non-Samsung-developed custom firmware.
 
L

LinZheFu

进士
Thanks. However, under Custom Fonts, the Reset Font button is grayed out for all 3 sections. Should I use the customize Chinese font setting to select a font that I have yet to download? And if so, any ideas on what font and where to obtain it?
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
No, that means the problem is on Samsung's end - the built-in Pleco font supports all of those characters, so the only reason they wouldn't display would be because your tablet's firmware is overriding our app's font customizations. In which case there's no other custom font that would get this working correctly either.

The only other possibility I can think of is that somehow our font file got corrupted and it's falling back on the system one for that reason - you could eliminate that possibility by deleting and then reinstalling Pleco. But it's pretty unlikely the corruption would be that specific in any case.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
There's no way to replace system fonts unless your tablet is "rooted" or you install some custom alternate firmware on it, unfortunately. However, we can consider adding an option to bring back the uglier character rendering behavior from our old app on devices with buggy firmware like your Samsung.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Update: we've now come up with what we think is a pretty reliable workaround for this, so it should be included in 3.1.6.
 
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