A Few Tips When Using the Exporter

[sych]

Hi All,

Here are a few things that I have discovered when importing/exporting, that may be of assistance to others:

1) Scores for cards in multiple lists -- As Mike mentioned in another thread, if a card is present in multiple Pleco 1 lists, when it is imported into Pleco 2 it will be imported as a single card (but in multiple categories), and the score will come from whichever card was reviewed most recently in Pleco 1. If you're using multiple lists to test different skills (as I am), this will be an issue you'll need to consider.

2) Flags with the same names as Lists -- I had a flag called "Write", which I used to flag cards that I want to learn to write (not just read) in the future. I also had a list called "Write" which stored all the cards I was currently learning to write. After the export/import process, my "Write" list and the cards with the "Write" flag were combined into a single category called "Write", which is not what I wanted! So, make sure your flag and list names in Pleco 1 are all unique!

3) Flag and list names containing a slash "/" character -- In Pleco 2, the slash character seems to denote sub-categories, so any flag or list you have that has a slash in its name in Pleco 1 will be converted to a category and an identical sub-category in Pleco 2. For example, in Pleco 1 I had a list called ""Interjections / Onomatopoeia", and in Pleco 2 it has been converted to a category called ""Interjections " with a sub-category called " Onomatopoeia". To avoid this, rename your flags and lists before export so that they don't have slash characters. NB, the contents of the sub-category appear to be identical to the parent category, so if you have already made this mistake it seems safe to just delete the sub-category and rename the parent.

4) Flag and list names containing Chinese characters -- I used CJKOS to give some of my flags and lists Chinese names, but the names were not properly carried across to Pleco 2, I just got a bunch of nonsense characters. Probably an encoding issue. If you're using Chinese characters in your flag or list names, rename them before exporting.

 

[mikelove]

On #1, remember you actually can set the "duplicate cards" option to "allow" if you'd rather not lose any of your old scores - even if the preferences are configured to not allow any more duplicate cards to be created, it'll still let you keep the ones you created before. So if you'd like to gradually resolve duplicates manually as you encounter them that would be a way to do that.

The next version of the converter should take care of both duplicate flag names (putting them under a bigger Flags category) and slashes in list names (replacing them with a \ or something), so if you don't want to fiddle around with those now just wait a few weeks.

DO NOT delete a subcategory thinking that all of the cards will still be left in the parent category - they won't be unless you specifically put them there. Doing a search for cards in a parent category will by default include all of the categories under it (we forgot to add an "exact category" search option in Manage Flashcards, but we will) but the cards are only tied to the subcategory - we built it this way so that it would be easy and relatively fast to move subcategories between different parents, if for example you want to keep one category for "words I'm currently studying" or somesuch as a convenience.

If you want to move all of the words from a subcategory to its parent, do a search for cards specifically in that subcategory in Manage Flashcards, then tap the More button and use the Add category command to add all of the cards to the parent category - you can then safely delete the subcategory.

XML exports are done exclusively in UTF-8 encoding (the importer will actually work with UTF-16 if you put a UTF-16 byte order character at the start of the file, but otherwise it assumes it's UTF-8); XML isn't really able to support GB and Big5 as far as I know. The current system actually stores category names and such in Unicode, we just haven't gotten around to getting them to draw correctly in Chinese; this probably will be supported on Pocket PC eventually though it may never be on Palm since it's actually an incredible amount of work to redesign a built-in user interface control on Palm to use Chinese.

 

[sych]

Thanks Mike.

Regarding the categories/subcategories that were created appearing to have the same content, obviously this was a misconception on my part, thanks for clearing that up.

Eventually I ended up doing a re-import after removing slashes, renaming flags and removing Chinese characters. This wasn't a big deal but it would have been good to know about first, or have the exporter warn me. As you've said I trust you'll address these one way or another in a future version.

Thanks again.