Entry list sorting

[patfla]

Hi,

Downloaded and installed the PlecoDict demo on my Tungsten T - works fine.

First impression. Looks very nice. Appears to be more vocabulary. In just the Oxford that is - even without the ABC and NWP (which I plan to do at some point).

One thing was in the Oxford Concise and might be in PlecoDict now. But I can't seem to find.

You used to be able to sort the Entry List in what the old documentation called Entry (or Dictionary) mode. That is, you'd first have a single character, then this would be immediately followed by all the compouns for which this character is the starting character. (As opposed to 'mixing the two' ... or having all the singletons followed by all the compounds of which they were the starting characters).

I may simply be looking at things incorrectly in PlecoDict, in which case please straighten me out. Or it may not be there yet?

pat

 

[mikelove]

It's still there - tap on the middle one of the three buttons right above the Entry List (the one with jia/yi/bing located above ABC) and it should switch to that mode. The dictionary switches to the other mode whenever you enter a Pinyin query, so that may be the source of your confusion.

 

[MeiXi]

entry sorting...

I was going to post this elsewhere before noticing that it is (somewhat) related to patfla's earlier post.

For a concrete example of the frustration I am having with the new dictionary, try looking up the following word:
接觸 jiēch? touch, be in contact with
using the pinyin "jiechu" (no tone marks). In Oxford, there are a mere 5 choices, including the one we are searching for. BUT in ABC, there are 3 full screens (on my Zire 31) and the desired combination is on the second page, in part because the display list includes all of the multicharacter combinations starting with 解除 and 接觸 .

It would be great if these multicharacter combinations would stay out of the way until selected in order to shorten the display. Just a thought. I know this is a function of ABC having more entries, but perhaps having more entries calls for a new way to display them to make them useful.

I would suggest that (in a far off future version of the dictionary software) the responses to pinyin queries should be ordered to show most likely guess for what you were searching for (lets face it, some of these compounds are pretty rare), that would give the dictionary more functionality than a computerized paper dictionary.

Thanks!

 

[mikelove]

The search indexing / ordering is still being retooled - among other things, we'll be ordering the entries a little more like they are in most Chinese dictionaries (so entries with the same first character are grouped together but they're sorted by Pinyin), and I believe you'll also be able to have shorter entries come up before longer ones in search results.