PLC Newlines / Entry Layout In General

We had a customer write to complain about the newlines we added between PLC dictionary example sentences in 2.2.11, which prompts me to ask: how does everybody else feel about that layout change? Is this generally a positive thing that we should adopt in other dictionaries, or does it make it harder to get the sense of a character/word's meaning? Do we need to add some other feature like (for example) making example sentences collapsible in order to keep them from getting in the way too much?

As a temporary workaround for people bothered by the change, we've posted the old version of the PLC database at:

http://www.pleco.com/p2cebasic-111205.zip

Copy this to your iPhone or download it directly from Pleco's built-in web browser (Settings / Web Browser), then open up Settings / File Manager and tap on it to install it. It'll show up as a "demo version," but that will be cleared up once you exit Pleco completely (go to the home screen, double-press the home button, tap-hold on Pleco and tap on the red (-) button at the corner of its icon) and reopen it. That will get you back to the old version without the extra space between examples.

For what it's worth, I like the Tuttle dictionary's layout the most. Compact and easy to see each section/sentence (especially the black box bullets).
I like newlines, but not blank lines.

Personally, I don't really like the change. I've given it some time, hoping to get accustomed to this new formatting but it just feels a little bit too empty, especially if you've enlarged the font size.

I agree that Tuttle's formatting is the best. It's compact but really neat at the same time. Collapsible entries sounds cool, but I really need to get my hands on it before I can give any real feedback.

I like the improvement. It does seem like a lot of empty space, but it is definitely better than before.

i also like the change. it makes things easier to read. there is some empty space, but for me its fine, but perhaps removing the empty lines might be an option.

Dear Mike,

I was just getting ready to complain about how much white space there was in the list layout with what appears to be double line spacing, and with 3 lines per entry sometimes the dictionary only needs one or two lines but 3 lines are always allocated, resulting in way too much white space for my taste.

And then you went and put even more white space into the PLC dictionary itself.

No, I don't like all that white space, either in the PLC dictionary or the list layout. I'd love to have the ability to do single spacing instead of double spacing in list layout, and I'd like to see a lot less white space separating the examples in PLC.

John

Maybe everyone could be made happy by having an option to strip out blank lines? Since I'm on a small device, I like to cram as much on a screen as possible, but maybe if was on a tablet I'd welcome the separation of the white space.

Quite a few negatives here - seems clear that we need to make it optional at least. (but I'm glad it's an improvement for some folks anyway)

Alexis said:

For what it's worth, I like the Tuttle dictionary's layout the most. Compact and easy to see each section/sentence (especially the black box bullets).
I like newlines, but not blank lines.

Click to expand...

Fair enough. Using punctuation rather than whitespace to separate entry parts on a small screen makes a lot of sense, though we'd like to stay a bit more consistent between dictionaries.

johnh113 said:

I was just getting ready to complain about how much white space there was in the list layout with what appears to be double line spacing, and with 3 lines per entry sometimes the dictionary only needs one or two lines but 3 lines are always allocated, resulting in way too much white space for my taste.

Click to expand...

Is this on an iPad or an iPhone? Doesn't seem too ridiculous to me, but I suppose we could tweak the spacing a bit.

However, the 3-line problem is a function of how long lists work on iOS; basically, if you don't make every list row the same size it makes everything MUCH slower to load / scroll / etc. So we're stuck with the extra space, though we do default to relatively few definition lines for that very reason.

Alexis said:

Maybe everyone could be made happy by having an option to strip out blank lines? Since I'm on a small device, I like to cram as much on a screen as possible, but maybe if was on a tablet I'd welcome the separation of the white space.

Click to expand...

Well in theory if we get all of our dictionaries using more-or-less the same entry formatting, we could make the format itself customizable; give you a screen where you can literally pick the style (bold, whitespace, etc) for each part of the entry. We've actually got most of the programming work done for that already (it was mostly a matter of switching from tagging text by its format to tagging it by the type of data it represents, which is a switch we quietly made a few updates ago), it's just the data file end of it that's dragging out.

Please make it optional! I really have a hard time adjusting to the new look

I mostly like it. Sometimes there are ones where I wonder what happened, such as di4 (target; bull's-eye) -- did something go wrong so mu4di4 is just hanging out in the middle w/o explanation?

A big increase in readability would be replacing the ~ with the actual characters, even if in only one dictionary to start.

Obviously this is a rabbit hole of endless tweaks, but you could also increase space by playing with different font sizes -- have the English translation in a smaller font than the Chinese characters in example sentences, for ex.

mikelove said:

johnh113 said:

I was just getting ready to complain about how much white space there was in the list layout with what appears to be double line spacing, and with 3 lines per entry sometimes the dictionary only needs one or two lines but 3 lines are always allocated, resulting in way too much white space for my taste.

Click to expand...

Is this on an iPad or an iPhone? Doesn't seem too ridiculous to me, but I suppose we could tweak the spacing a bit.

However, the 3-line problem is a function of how long lists work on iOS; basically, if you don't make every list row the same size it makes everything MUCH slower to load / scroll / etc. So we're stuck with the extra space, though we do default to relatively few definition lines for that very reason.

Click to expand...

Dear Mike,

I'm on an iPhone. I don't object to the concept in the new PLC layout. It's just way too much white space for my taste. If you cut the distance between entries down a lot, and grouped them a little better, it could work. Thanks for the explanation as to why we can't have variable lines in list view. I would still like to have the option to single space, or 1.5 line space, instead of double line spacing.

John

character said:

I mostly like it. Sometimes there are ones where I wonder what happened, such as di4 (target; bull's-eye) -- did something go wrong so mu4di4 is just hanging out in the middle w/o explanation?

A big increase in readability would be replacing the ~ with the actual characters, even if in only one dictionary to start.

Obviously this is a rabbit hole of endless tweaks, but you could also increase space by playing with different font sizes -- have the English translation in a smaller font than the Chinese characters in example sentences, for ex.

Click to expand...

Dear Character,

I agree. I would like to see the ~ go away, and I would like the ability to mix a smaller western font with a larger Chinese font.

John

character said:

A big increase in readability would be replacing the ~ with the actual characters, even if in only one dictionary to start.

Click to expand...

Already supported - Settings / Dictionary / Entry Display / Replace head with ~ (turn that option off). Only works in PLC at the moment, but will work in ABC very soon and other dictionaries too.

johnh113 said:

I'm on an iPhone. I don't object to the concept in the new PLC layout. It's just way too much white space for my taste. If you cut the distance between entries down a lot, and grouped them a little better, it could work. Thanks for the explanation as to why we can't have variable lines in list view. I would still like to have the option to single space, or 1.5 line space, instead of double line spacing.

Click to expand...

Sensible enough, though I'd really call it more like 1.5 space at the most even now - only gets up to 2 if you're using a really tiny font (because we pad them with a fixed number of pixels between fields).

johnh113 said:

I agree. I would like to see the ~ go away, and I would like the ability to mix a smaller western font with a larger Chinese font.

Click to expand...

That one's difficult if we're mixing them on the same line - you end up with an ugly block of whitespace above the non-Chinese characters. We could consider a larger font for monolingual entries, though, and I suppose also for example sentences as long as we keep the characters/Pinyin/definition on separate lines.

mikelove said:

character said:

A big increase in readability would be replacing the ~ with the actual characters, even if in only one dictionary to start.

Click to expand...

Already supported - Settings / Dictionary / Entry Display / Replace head with ~ (turn that option off). Only works in PLC at the moment, but will work in ABC very soon and other dictionaries too.

Click to expand...

I set that, but then didn't see the change when I went back to a dictionary entry I had open. This morning I tried new dictionary entries, and it does indeed work on dictionary entries opened after making the change.

character said:

I set that, but then didn't see the change when I went back to a dictionary entry I had open. This morning I tried new dictionary entries, and it does indeed work on dictionary entries opened after making the change.

Click to expand...

Yeah, we should probably be a bit more aggressive about screen refreshes on a return from the Settings tab - thanks.

Yeah, I wasn't too happy with all the white spacing either, but got sort of accustomed to it by now. It would be nice if there was an option to have pinyin in the same line as the characters (and perhaps even the definition), though.

So instead of:

文学

～家
～jiā
writer, man of letters; literati

change it to:

～家 ～jiā
writer, man of letters; literati

or even:

～家 ～jiā writer, man of letters; literati

goldyn chyld said:

Yeah, I wasn't too happy with all the white spacing either, but got sort of accustomed to it by now. It would be nice if there was an option to have pinyin in the same line as the characters (and perhaps even the definition), though.

Click to expand...

So you're OK with the white space before and after examples, but you'd like characters/pinyin/(possibly)definition on the same line? Interesting - complete opposite of what most of the other people here have said, so it seems like another argument for making this customizable.

Owh, I don't know why I never thought of it before, but how about separation using colours? It might be interesting. It would also make it possible for us to easily differentiate entries even without newlines since the entire sentence is highlighted with that colour.

scykei said:

Owh, I don't know why I never thought of it before, but how about separation using colours? It might be interesting. It would also make it possible for us to easily differentiate entries even without newlines since the entire sentence is highlighted with that colour.

Click to expand...

Not wild about that, honestly - our software is already a little bit too multicolored thanks to tone coloring. I'd rather do something more subtle involving textures or shading, something that won't look out-of-place next to other iPhone apps. (screenshots count for a lot)

mikelove said:

goldyn chyld said:

Yeah, I wasn't too happy with all the white spacing either, but got sort of accustomed to it by now. It would be nice if there was an option to have pinyin in the same line as the characters (and perhaps even the definition), though.

Click to expand...

So you're OK with the white space before and after examples, but you'd like characters/pinyin/(possibly)definition on the same line? Interesting - complete opposite of what most of the other people here have said, so it seems like another argument for making this customizable.

Click to expand...

Umm, I'd still prefer less white spacing... Make it slightly separated, but not as much as it is right now. And making it an option to move pinyin next to the characters etc. would be nice.