A query and a suggestion

[naminori]

Here is the query.

Is there a way to supress the black ribbons or bars in the display of radical search findings?

The black bars give in a redundant way only the character searched - with no other information. And if I make a screenshot of the findings for printing them out the
black bars are very dominant and make the text hard to peruse. - Could they be supressed - maybe even with the character in white fond - wich does not give
any information anyway?
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And here is the suggestion.

I have chosen in the settings for the search screen of the dictionary that head characters in the results are not sortetd by frequency but by pinyin and tones only. This works quite well. But it seems that the arrangement for characters with several readings is locked. And thus on gets these displays.

or

I find it very hard to remember the other readings in this display. It would be nice to have in such cases all the secondary, tertiary etc readings arranged in alphabetic
pinyin and tone order. If that was technically feasible.

 

[Shun]

Hi naminori,

I agree with you in principle on the black bars, to save space, even though there might be cases where the character(s) in the black bars do not exactly correspond to the headwords in the dictionary definitions. Perhaps when multi-character definitions and a mixture of Traditional and Simplified characters are involved, this could be more likely to happen.

I have chosen in the settings for the search screen of the dictionary that head characters in the results are not sortetd by frequency but by pinyin and tones only. This works quite well. But it seems that the arrangement for characters with several readings is locked. And thus on gets these displays.

...

I find it very hard to remember the other readings in this display. It would be nice to have in such cases all the secondary, tertiary etc readings arranged in alphabetic
pinyin and tone order. If that was technically feasible.

That's an interesting point that probably only Mike knows enough about. It may be a matter of implementation in version 3.2, changing with version 4.0.

Cheers,

Shun

 

[mikelove]

No way to suppress the black bars at the moment.

With the readings, it looks like the issue in these is the mix of different simplified/traditional versions of characters - Pleco isn't actually treating this as results for a single character because we uniquely identify characters by the combination of simplified + traditional + reading. We are planning to add options to make character search more restrictive - only match traditional or simplified and not both, and likewise ignore one set or the other for sorting / merging / etc purposes - which should hopefully address that. (the current behavior makes sense as a default because people frequently don't know what character set they're searching)

 

[naminori]

Wow. - The very wide horizons - or just Pandora's box. - I am aware that the characters in the bar give an orientation about whether the searched character is traditional or simplified. But there is still the simple question about the choice of layout. Why has there to be a long black obituary bar for precisely one small character on the left margin? - Could it not be enough to put that lead character into a square of an inch or a centimeter?

The options in further builds to have just one set, simplified or traditional, in the definitions may be appreciated by some. - But that is somewhat related to my other post in which I expressed my surprise that in the lists of compounds for a given character I am seeing only traditional characters - my prefered set - and not, as in most other surroundings, the simplified form attached in brackets. And the completely random arrangement in that compound list is also surprising.


?

 

[mikelove]

We actually didn't design this interface for looking up lots of characters at once, we designed it for breaking down sentences into their constituent words. And for that purpose, it makes sense to have section headers like this, in order to keep track of where you are in the sentence. It's great that you've found this other use for it, but nevertheless that's not the use we optimized it around.