Pleco for Android 3.2.36 Beta

mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
As on iOS, we're bringing forward a few 4.0 features early, in this case enough of them to justify a beta test; go to https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.pleco.chinesesystem to activate beta on Google Play or download the APK directly from us at http://cdn.pleco.com/androidapps/plecodroid-161025-website.apk.
  • Added experimental AnkiDroid integration. (this requires AnkiDroid 2.6 or later)

    The approach we've opted for on this is basically to assume that anybody who wants to use Pleco with AnkiDroid a) is a committed AnkiDroid user already and so would like us to fit into (rather than replace) their existing AnkiDroid workflow, and b) probably has little or no interest in using our own flashcard system alongside AnkiDroid; we've therefore designed it to 'take over' Pleco flashcard functions entirely, so that all flashcard adding + duplicate check commands will now go directly to AnkiDroid instead of to Pleco.

    You can configure this in Settings / Flashcards; each AnkiDroid model you want to use with Pleco needs to be configured as far as how our simplified/traditional/mandarin/cantonese/definition fields map into it. We even support cloze deletions; turn on "+ for each example" in Settings / Definition Screen and configure a model for sentences in Settings / Flashcards and you'll then be able to automatically create Anki cloze cards from Pleco example sentences in a single tap.

    Tags are handled a bit oddly - there's not currently a way to query AnkiDroid for the list of active tags, so instead we have you type in a comma-separated list of tags that you'd like to be able to view / assign in Pleco in Settings. (we also display tags in dictionary definition headers, though not yet with any particular associated colors)

    Integration also includes a duplicate dialog (with an HTML preview of the card) and even an editing screen, so you can actually view + edit the text of your existing AnkiDroid notes within Pleco if you for example come upon some new insight about a particular word while viewing one of our dictionary entries. Long-pressing the + icon will let you preview a card before creating it + customize its model / deck / tags.

    This should not be interpreted as a sign that we've lost confidence in / are scaling back our efforts on the 4.0 flashcard revamp; if anything, we're hoping this will provide us with some useful feedback for that revamp (a few of the things we're trying out with AnkiDroid here - clozes e.g. - are areas we're also pursuing in our own system). Also, the same APIs that let us send cards from Pleco to AnkiDroid now can also very easily be used to move data the other way, and we're hoping this may let us streamline people's migration from Anki to Pleco once we blow you all away with the new stuff we're adding in 4.0 :) But it's also an acknowledgement that there are a lot of people out there using AnkiDroid now and that using Pleco for your Chinese dictionary should not preclude you from using another system for flashcards. (in fact we have another popular non-Pleco flashcard system integration in the offing that should work along very similar lines to this one)
  • Made PDF + (still image / block recognizing) OCR scroll around to follow the popup reader instead of staying in one spot.
  • Made PDF reader remember your last location when returning from a different part of Pleco.
  • Changed Screen Reader invocation a bit so that it will now default to showing a notification along with a floating button for new users, in anticipation of changes coming in future versions of Android that will require background services to show notifications in order to avoid being terminated.
  • Added new experimental Kai-style stroke order diagrams; you can download them in Add-ons / Features, they'll unlock the same characters as our existing free ones in the free version + unlock about 8500 additional characters if you own our paid Stroke Order Diagrams add-on; for that latter bit, you may need to go into Registration / Check for other purchases for them to activate. Toggle between those and the older Song-style stroke order diagrams by tapping on the button at the bottom left corner of the stroke order box.
  • Added an option in Settings / Definition Screen to auto-play stroke order diagrams.
  • Added a 'report missing entry' button to the long search breakdown toolbar.
  • Added an option in Settings / Miscellaneous to delete + force a re-download of Pleco's built-in data files (in case they get corrupted).
  • Fixed a bunch of missing Cantonese readings for single syllables in CC-CEDICT.
  • Fixed a bug that made bundles show up in item detail screens in Add-ons even when you already own / are no longer able to purchase them.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause the audio buttons next to variant pronunciations in dictionary entries (e.g. in the Cross-Straits dictionary) to play the audio for the original word instead of the variant.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause some valid Yale Cantonese search strings to fail to return results.
  • Fixed a bug that could make it impossible to hear Cantonese text-to-speech when you had the male Cantonese recordings installed and only those.
  • Fixed a bug that made the option to put up a category prompt on just tapping the + button not work with example sentences.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause the dictionary order in Manage Dictionaries to be reset when reloading the add-on catalog.
  • Fixed a bug with OCR 'reopen last image' on PDF files.
  • Fixed a bug that could prevent custom flashcard creation from working correctly after choosing a caetgory with the multi-level category chooser.
  • Fixed a bug that could cause third-tone pinyin syllables to go missing in flashcard multiple-choice tests on some devices from Chinese OEMs with inexplicably buggy Pinyin support.
  • Fixed (we hope) some bugs relating to Pleco's persistent access to opened files.
  • Fixed a few more random crashing bugs, including one when putting Pleco in the background on Android 7, one when opening the image picker on some devices, and one when changing text encodings in the reader.
 
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HW60

HW60

状元
The button to toggle between the KaiTi font and the standard font does not work at once when the order of the tabs in the Character Info Screen is not the default order (I have WORDS, CHARS, STROKE, DICT, SENTS). To see the button, I have to change the tabs swiping left and right a little bit, then the button is visible.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
@HW60 - that's odd; I could see this happening with STROKE as the first tab but second versus third shouldn't make a difference. Does this happen regardless of whether or not the character is covered by the Kai font?
 
HW60

HW60

状元
Can you give me an example for a Kai font only character? I do not know how to find the difference, and as the standard font has 28000 characters, it would take some time testing ... I found it with 学 and 日.
The button is shown when I swipe from stroke to words or from stroke to sents - from stroke to chars or dict won't help.
 
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HW60

HW60

状元
The auto-play of stroke order diagrams has a similar bug as the initially missing button for stroke order diagrams. With the option set, tapping on STROKE nothing happens, but after swiping to any (!) tab (or selecting any tab) and back to STROKE, the auto-play starts.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Hmm... might have to do with WORDS being the first tab loaded, then. Will investigate further + hopefully fix shortly in second beta.
 
HW60

HW60

状元
When I enter a new custom card after searching for a card, i.e. starting with category None, and select a category before saving the new card, and come back to the card input screen, the input has disappeared. (Built Oct 12)
 
HW60

HW60

状元
I have only custom flashcards, about 50% japanese cards, which can only be entered by the card input screen. I would certainly have realized that problem before if it had existed. I often use Search Cards before entering a new card, so I often started with category none.

EDIT: I just downloaded version 24.08.2016 from the Pleco homepage. This version works without the bug of 3.2.36 Beta.
 
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Z

zhaomao

秀才
I can confirm that the KaiTi stroke order toggle fix works in the most recent build. Pretty! :)

However, I just noticed that in flashcard review, the font in the answers is not bolded anymore. Some of the pinyin characters are not aliased properly (if I'm using the term correctly). In general, it's harder (for me) to read because of this. I haven't tried the previous beta build yet, but I can confirm 3.2.35 has the bold font in the answers.

UPDATE: the previous beta build also has this anomaly, so it's been introduced in 3.2.36.
 
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leguan

探花
Thank you for the very nice update! Kai-style stroke order diagrams are great to have!
One bug to report: For some reason the definition screen for the new term doesn't seem to reset to the top of the scroll window - rather the scroll position seems to follow the previously searched term (seemingly as a percentage or the total scroll window?)
 
A

Abun

榜眼
Thanks a lot for the update! I'm one of those people that use Anki for SRS, though it's because I also learn other languages besides Chinese and like them in one place rather than some kind of ideological devotion to Anki :D

Unfortunately there are at least two bugs (at least I suppose they're not intentional) that prevent me from using the integration of Anki into Pleco:
  • I am unable to freely choose the deck the cards are sent to. Both in the options screen and in the popup when I want to send a card, one of my decks has already been decided for me and no alternatives to that one are presented to me on tap. I don't know why it decided on that particular deck (it is neither the first nor the last one in my alphabetical list, not even if one only counts decks with names in Latin characters), but it unfortunately happens to be the wrong one (even if it weren't, I would like to use the link to send cards to different decks so I cannot use it properly if I'm limited to one).
  • For equally unknown reasons, I cannot set up the fields the way I want to. I have the definition in the first field in Anki, but that unfortunately definition is missing from the list of choices for the first field (it does appear in later ones).
I hope that these bugs can be fixed because the update looks like it could save me a huge amount of time once I'm able to set it up like I need! Awesome idea, many thanks again for that!
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
@leguan - that's an odd one; what's your current device model / Android version?

@Abun - first one is not intentional; should be able to select the deck of your choice. Could you possibly email or PM me a backup of your Anki database?

With the field setup, that's also a bug. The first field is the only one that Anki indexes for duplicate-checking, so if you've configured Pleco to do duplicate checking against your Anki deck, the first field has to be populated with something that we can feasibly search for, i.e., some plaintext combination of characters and pinyin. However, it looks like at the moment the definition fails to show up as an option even with duplicate checking disabled, so that's something we need to fix.

(we have come up with a workaround for this, incidentally, but it's fairly complicated / time-consuming, so we're waiting to see how popular this feature is + how many requests we get for duplicate checks that don't involve the first field before we decide whether or not to go ahead with implementing it)
 
L

leguan

探花
It happens every time on both my Nexus 7 2013 and Nexus 5. Both are on Android 6.0.1. Heres a couple of screenshots. After searching 不 scrolling down a little in the ABC entry I searched 一 but the definition screen doesn't start at the top of the ABC entry.
 

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leguan

探花
It also happens when switching to different entries in the search results list. Example: switching between two entries for 铺。
 

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A

Abun

榜眼
mikelove said:
@Abun - first one is not intentional; should be able to select the deck of your choice. Could you possibly email or PM me a backup of your Anki database?
Click to expand...
Done.

mikelove said:
With the field setup, that's also a bug. The first field is the only one that Anki indexes for duplicate-checking, so if you've configured Pleco to do duplicate checking against your Anki deck, the first field has to be populated with something that we can feasibly search for, i.e., some plaintext combination of characters and pinyin. However, it looks like at the moment the definition fails to show up as an option even with duplicate checking disabled, so that's something we need to fix.

(we have come up with a workaround for this, incidentally, but it's fairly complicated / time-consuming, so we're waiting to see how popular this feature is + how many requests we get for duplicate checks that don't involve the first field before we decide whether or not to go ahead with implementing it)
Click to expand...
Ah, I understand your reasoning. But the definition field isn't the only one that might cause unintentional duplicates and I guess it's not even the most likely one. Given the abundance of homophones, Pinyin (and even Jyutping) fields will inevitably have duplicates sooner or later. And even the character fields are not safe in that regard because of a multitude of ambiguities especially in single characters (了, 得, 倒...) but also multi-character entries (e.g. 澄清 --> chéngqīng / dèngqīng). Considering it is possible to choose a different dictionary for the definition if need be, I would surmise that the definition might be safer to use as a key than even the characters.
 
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