Beta 7(c) Bug Report Thread

If I highlight a character and jump to the popup definition, sometimes instead of the character I selected I get the definition for the character 耀 (yào). This is not reproducible and does not seem to depend on the character I originally selected, but the result is always the 耀. If a call up for the popup definition for the same character a few times in a row, the chances that the wrong character is displayed seems to increase, but even then it is not conistent. If I get the wrong character and immediately call the popup definition again, I might get the correct character again, or I might get the wrong.

Andreas
 

KesterN

秀才
mikelove said:
How have you set up your Stylus Actions?

Tap char action = Char info
Sel text action = Popup defn

Step 2 actually highlights the character. After closing the popup defn dialogue, the character remains highlighted.

mikelove said:
And in #4 could you be a little more specific about this right-to-left stroke? Is the character highlighted before you do it, i.e. you're just dragging the stylus across it and the highlight doesn't change, or does dragging the stylus cause the character to be highlighted?

The former. I'm dragging the stylus across an already-highlighted character.
 

radioman

状元
Popup Definition - within a flashcard session, where I have it set to first show definitions, then reveal headword and pronunciation, I reveal the headword and pronunciation. Then I try and highlight the the headword characters - For instance, I have up right now 分之. So I move to highlight the headword characters, they both are clearly highlighted, and I hold down the stylus (I can do it over top either character) and I get the menu (Copy/Magnify/Char Info/Popup Defn). I select Popup Defn (of this I am certain) and I get brought to 分 in the popup window。。。However, if I go to the definition section of the flashcard that has been revealed, I can select 分之 from the body in the examples, hold the cursor, get the menu (Copy/Magnify/Char Info/Popup Defn) and I am brought directly to a popup menu with 分之 (as I would like to happen with the headword). This behavior is no different than what I experienced under previous betas (I did confirm I am running beta 2.0b7(c))

Definition Scrolling - With regard to the scrolling, I should have better articulated that it is not in the flashcards where I am seeing the problem but in the regular dictionary window. I think I figured out the issue. Basically, buttons were mapped for copy and paste for the up and down Nav keys. I removed them and the scrolling works fine now.

By the way, just a note I am as well seeing the reader undesirably and automatically open when Pleco starts. I am not doing "search clipboard on open",

mikelove said:
radioman - are you sure you're selecting the Popup Defn command instead of Char Info? With the definition not scrolling, reset the button mappings (i.e., go into Preferences / Flashcards / Buttons, tap on the boxes and press the up/down buttons again) and that should get it working - we made a change to that system recently to fix some bugs with buttons not registering correctly on Treos, but it screwed up the character codes for them in the process.
 
The Duelist said:
mikelove said:
The Duelist - still no luck, though I'm interested to see auto-detect search language is making a difference - what about the "1-char results" option in "Results" and the "Match Pinyin syllables exactly" option in Query, does changing either of those (with auto-detect turned on) get rid of the crash?
I Am Able To Get Rid Of The Crash With These Settings:
Query -> Auto-Detect Search Language - On
Results -> Fall Back On Full Text Search - Off
mikelove said:
The Duelist - interesting, still not seeing it here but maybe we can find something potentially troublesome in the full-text search code. Could you let me know all of the options that you've select in Display / Query / Results? Might be something else in there that we're not trying. You're not using a user-created dictionary, right?
Here Are My Settings:

Display
Headword Display: = Mix w/Dashes
Mandarin Pron: = Pinyin w/Tones
Magnify Characters In Headword = Sel
Dict Name = Flash When Changed

Query
Auto-Detect Search Language = Sel
Clear Input Field on Lang Switch = Sel
Single-Char Wildcard := '?'
Multi-Char Wildcard := '*'
Full-Text Search Prefix:= '~' (Tilde)

Results
Delay Before Search:= 1/2 Sec
Sort Results By:= Word Length
Always Search Dicts In Order = Sel
Fallback On Full-Text Search = Sel
1-Char Results For 1-Char Search = Sel
Open Entry List On Search = Sel

I've Tried Many Combinations Of Just About All These Preference Options.
(Plus Other Display/Query/Results Preferences)

The 'Combination' That Always Crashes Is:
Auto-Detect Search Language = Sel
Fallback On Full-Text Search = Sel

I Can Set Either Option, But Not Both At The Same Time.
 

caesartg

榜眼
Hi Mike

Can't seem to get the "Send to Reader" function working. I select some text from the dictionary and press the button and just get a capital U with a bar over it in the reader.

Also, the +1 correct cards result bug I spotted earlier - when I uncheck 'review incorrect cards at end', the bug appears. When I check it again, the bug disappears.

Batch remapping flashcards to another dictionary - small HCI point - you have a counter counting up the flashcards being remapped but no indication that the process has completed. When I first did this, I thought my PDA has crashed. Further on this, I remapped a batch of cards to the ABC dictionary from an imported list. When I listed the cards, many of them were still showing dictionary as 'none'. I figured out a way to select only the 'none dictionary' flashcard entries in a specific category (the input elements in the 'Advanced.../Settings' screen in the manage flashcards area seem to have quite a few bugs still to be fixed - play around with remapping dictionaries, selecting dictionaries, etc a few times and hopefully you'll see some of these). However, when I tried to remap these 'none dictionary' flashcards to other dictionaries, they remained as none.

Following importing some FCs from a textfile, I noticed when I tested myself with them that some appeared in only traditional form, even though I'd selected simplified. I'm guessing that the vocab I imported which was Taiwanese PAVC vocab someone had created, was originally traditional and the system was simply displaying those cards it couldn't map a dictionary to in its original form (is this the behaviour?). By the way, some of the dictionary entries that didn't have a mapping were basic words like zhenghao and xiansheng. If you want, I could send you the imported file.

Hope this doesn't all read like gobbledegook

Cheers

Ben
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
KesterN - success! Thanks for the extra info - it turned out that there was a bug which could sometimes cause the dictionary to mis-calculate the position of the character you tapped on by one. The reason that resulted in a 耘 is that the character code for 耘 is 8018, which the software was using internally to specify the font size for the headword (18 in decimal is 24, which gets automatically doubled to 48 on a high-resolution Palm, matching the font48 magnified font file) - normally that code would be invisible but because the position was off it was reading the code and interpreting it as a regular character. Anyway, we've straightened it out now and in the process also fixed a related bug that could cause tapping on characters to not work if you tap on a character that's right next to an already-selected character. (耀 as reported by andreas.koenig is code 8000, which would also come up as a hidden character code, and goog1e's 耜 is code 801c = 28, which I assume is the font size he's using for headwords)

radioman - I'm not seeing this popup definition problem here - how exactly have you configured your Stylus Actions settings? Perhaps something else is triggering on just the one character. With the reader automatically opening on start, have you by any chance mapped launching Pleco to the same hardware button as Send to Reader or Open Reader? Or is either of those commands mapped to some other hardware button? If you set "Use reader if larger than" to "Never" (top item in the list), does that stop it from coming up?

The Duelist - still no luck, so I think we'll just do what we should have done in the first place which is add a quick check and not search at all if the input field doesn't contain any letters or Chinese characters - wouldn't return any results anyway so we might as well just skip them. Would have liked to have figured out what was actually causing the crash but that should at least get rid of it. Thanks for all of the detailed info.

caesartg - yeah, we just encountered that Send To Reader bug yesterday actually - it's a text encoding issue, if you set the reader's text encoding to UTF-16LE it'll come up just fine but when it's set to something else the software forgets to reset it before opening the reader on the dictionary entry text (which is always in that encoding).

There's already supposed to be a done indicator when you finish a batch operation, but it looks like there was a bug that kept it from coming up after dictionary remaps (function was exiting too early) - fixed now. If you could send me that flashcard file that would be very helpful - sounds like some sort of traditional character issue. (and yes, Settings is still a bit buggy)
 

johnh113

榜眼
Dear Reader,

This problem is probably user error and not related to Pleco, but when I'm doing flashcards and I try to adjust the volume, the side buttons don't do anything. I can save out of my session and increase the volume in preferences. That works fine, just a little inconvenient. Related information, when I am on a phone call, I can adjust the volume of the call (Only when I am actually making a call. Before making the call while punching in the numbers, the side volume controls don't do anything), and after hanging up, whatever volume the phone call was set at, that is now my audio volume. The only way I can lower it is to get back on a phone call and reduce the volume while connected. (I can modify that new "Phone call" audio level from the Pleco preferences, but even at preference level 1, my Pleco volume is too high if I left the phone call audio at bar 3 or 4.)

The volume of the audio files is rather loud. I set my preferences audio to 1, and I make a phone call to set my "phone call" audio to 0. At that point my Pleco audio is relatively faint but fine for a quiet environment. To raise the volume I move the preferences audio to 2. That is usually loud enough for me. But if I am on a phone call and set the phone call volume to bar 3 or 4, and leave it there when I exit the phone call, my Pleco volume is way too loud. And since my preferences audio is set at 1 or 2, there is no way I can bring the volume down to a tolerable level without making another phone call and adjusting the phone call volume while on a call.

I know this sounds incredibly stupid which is why I suspect I'm doing something wrong. But I can't figure out what it is. This is not a recent problem, it's been this way for 7a,b,c which is when I started testing the beta.

Any suggestions?

Palm Treo 680.

John
 

Mator

秀才
Hey Mike and anyone else with any ideas,

I'm having several problems with the program hanging up sporadically - not for a long time but just long enough to make it annoying. I wrote in a couple weeks back about the handwriting recognizer hanging up for a couple seconds at a time between strokes of a single character. I experimented with ptunes to see if that had any effect and got a utility to clear the cache to see if that would help but it's still the same. The worst is when I'm in a flashcard session and I'm playing the audio after reveal - if I don't wait until the audio is completely done before I advance to the next card (which really slows down my speed), the audio will pause/studder in the middle for a split second about 75% of the time. I've even tried turning the phone connection off, but still nothing better and there's always plenty of memory available. This is on a Treo 680, but my wife's 650 (with all the same programs installed) has no problems at all. Is your 680 or anyone else's experiencing any of these problems and does anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks for any help
 

caesartg

榜眼
Hi Mike

Not sure if this is a bug - I've been using Unihan for creating single character flashcards and noticed that any that I create, when I come across them in a flashcard session, they don't correlate with the main Trad/Simp setting. I guess then each traditional character and simplified rendition have separate entries in Unihan, but why does the trad/simp not work here? Otherwise, I'll just have to create a category for simplified renditions and one for traditional, but if you'll be fixing this later, I'll maybe hold fire until that's done.

Also, why do the stroke order diagrams for traditional characters look so crappy compared to the simplified stroke orders? Is it something to do with the fonts I have installed? I'm using a Dell X50V if that means anything here). Or course, if that's just the way it will be for the trad side, it's still a lot better than not having anything at all! (Maybe I should say why do the simplified characters look so beautiful next to the traditional stroke orders, but you might just assume I'm making a complimentary comment is all :) ).

By the way, any chance of an omnipresent audio slider or at least something for FC sessions? I keep having to exit sessions to change the volume depending on where I am (in a noisy place, library, office, etc) as there is no audio tool there.

Cheers

Ben
 

radioman

状元
I went to stylus Actions preferences and turned of "tap char action" from "popup defn" to "none". Unfortunately, that did not help. Any additional ideas welcome.

Perhaps additional information, but when in the flashcard session with the headwords highlighted, if I choose "magnify" or "copy", both those selections result in the 2 characters being utilized. Also I get the same behavior on the main dictionary screens when highlighting the headwords and holding the stylus to get the menu.



mikelove said:
radioman - I'm not seeing this popup definition problem here - how exactly have you configured your Stylus Actions settings? Perhaps something else is triggering on just the one character.
 
radioman said:
If I am in a flashcard session, and I flip the card and am looking at the headword and the definition. I want to be able to highlight the headword in whole or in part and have it bring up the definition in a pop-up menu. Right now, for example, if I have "pengyou" up and highlight "pengyou" in the headword and then bring up a pop-up definition, it would just bring up "peng". The reason I want to do this is because there are times (more than a few) that I want to look at alternate definitions (e.g., Tuttle) for additional information on the displayed flashcard. Right now the program only gives the first character of the highlighted headword. Within the definition section, it will look the full word.
mikelove said:
radioman - I'm not seeing this popup definition problem here - how exactly have you configured your Stylus Actions settings? Perhaps something else is triggering on just the one character.
I'm Also Seeing This Issue On My Palm T5.

I'm Using:
Highlight Headword (2+ Characters) -> Tap & Hold (Menu): Pop-Up Defn
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
johnh113 - there isn't any chance you might have accidentally assigned the side volume buttons to a flashcard command at some point, is there? Checking this on a Treo 680 here just now they seem to work fine, but if Pleco was capturing them as command inputs that would stop them from working correctly.

We do need to recalibrate the volume scale on Palm, we jacked up the volume because people were complaining it was too quiet but it seems like that was only a problem on Windows Mobile so apparently the two systems have different ideas about volume scales.

(by the way, any improvements on your earlier problems with sessions taking too long to start / crashing?)

Mator - the Treo 680 uses more aggressive thread scheduling than the 650, I believe, which essentially means that it's more assertive about pulling control away from the program when it has something it needs to do in the background. This is why the audio's getting interrupted (the system puts the audio on hold while it's working to find / select the next card) - unfortunately Palm doesn't really provide developers with any way to control that part of the operating system, so the only way we could stop the audio from skipping would be if we stopped audio playback as soon as you advanced to the next card. (which I imagine would be even more annoying)

The recognizer pause I'm less sure about, but there has to be something else going on in the background there - I assume it doesn't make any difference whether you're using it in the separate Input panel or on the main screen, right? And the handwriting auto-recognize option is turned off in the Input section of Preferences? Pleco really doesn't do anything between individual handwriting strokes (unless it's set to auto-recognize, in which case it runs the recognizer after the specified time elapses) so it's tough to think of what might be causing this on our end - if you're up for it you could always try a hard reset / reinstall, perhaps there's a buggy version of some old Palm OS system library or somesuch floating around in your Treo's memory.

caesartg - not a bug, just part of how Unihan works. The critical thing to remember about Unihan is that it's a character reference and not a dictionary; hence the definition / pronunciation / etc are tied to that exact character rather than a more flexible "entry." That difference is particularly important in cases like 历, characters where a single simplified character maps to more than one traditional - if you look up the Unihan definition for 历 you'll see it's "history; calendar," whereas the Unihan definition for its traditional variant 歷 is "take place, past, history" and for 曆 it's "calendar, era" - to supply a simplified/traditional mix you'd need to consolidate those three entries to two, one with 历[歷] and one with 历[曆] (as in the ABC), and adding that to Unihan would require not only reformatting it but rewriting a lot of the definitions.

The traditional character stroke order diagrams look like that because the company we licensed the stroke order data from didn't have a set of it for traditional characters and created it at our request (and we didn't pay them enough to get them to make them as pretty as the simplified-character ones :) ) - we've now, however, licensed a different set of stroke order data which we're planning to integrate into future versions of Pleco and that should allow for more similar-looking simplified and traditional characters. (along with some exciting new features like multi-radical search)

Good idea about flashcard audio, we could certainly add a popup list to the audio button to let you set the volume (and maybe also the gender at the same time).

radioman / The Duelist - is either of you using tone coloring by any chance? We just found a bug with that that could cause this exact problem.
 

johnh113

榜眼
Dear Mike,

When I use the side buttons to control sound in Pleco, the side buttons bring up the audio bars and I can adjust the bars with the side buttons. It's just that the sound volume doesn't change.

Regarding the startup times, the difference is staggering. With 7b, the changes you made allowed it to work but took 40-50 seconds to load my cards. With 7c, it takes about 3 seconds to load my cards

John
 

Mator

秀才
Hey Mike,
1. On the Treo volume problem my side volume buttons also have nothing to do with pleco volume (even if I adjust it while on a call). Not sure how johnh113 is changing pleco volume with the side buttons - on mine at least the side buttons only control the ringer volume and, while on a call, the phone volume. In your reply were you saying that yours there does adjust the pleco volume? If not maybe a button option assigned to the side buttons from within pleco would work or the previous idea someone had of adjusting from the audio icon if held down.

2. On my interrupted audio problem I found if I just give the audio a split second head start it seems to be better.

3. On the recognizer problem it happens on both separate and main screens and auto recognize is off - I will try some other 680s here and see if they are the same. I wasn't thinking it was a pleco problem, but just looking for any suggestions on what could be causing it.

4. One suggestion on categories - when a grouped category list is collapsed it would be nice if the main category heading had a greyed out box or something so you will know if any of the subs are checked
 

anchan42

探花
The Duelist said:
radioman said:
If I am in a flashcard session, and I flip the card and am looking at the headword and the definition. I want to be able to highlight the headword in whole or in part and have it bring up the definition in a pop-up menu. Right now, for example, if I have "pengyou" up and highlight "pengyou" in the headword and then bring up a pop-up definition, it would just bring up "peng". The reason I want to do this is because there are times (more than a few) that I want to look at alternate definitions (e.g., Tuttle) for additional information on the displayed flashcard. Right now the program only gives the first character of the highlighted headword. Within the definition section, it will look the full word.
mikelove said:
radioman - I'm not seeing this popup definition problem here - how exactly have you configured your Stylus Actions settings? Perhaps something else is triggering on just the one character.
I'm Also Seeing This Issue On My Palm T5.

I'm Using:
Highlight Headword (2+ Characters) -> Tap & Hold (Menu): Pop-Up Defn

I have got the same problem with my Treo 680. The problem is gone when I turn off the tone coloring.
Another problem I have with pop up definition is that I cannot change the dictionary. It always calls up OX definition for Chinese to English. I can change the dictionary just fine for English to Chinese.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
johnh113 - great! Glad to hear that issue's resolved.

Mator - The side buttons don't adjust the volume, actually - sorry I didn't remember that (haven't used the Treo as my actual phone in a while). The categories that have selected children (but aren't selected themselves) should be automatically opened whenever you open a screen with a category tree. Not sure what might be causing that recognizer problem... might be a third-party application, or it could even be some carrier-specific customization (is this an unlocked phone?) that runs even when the phone's turned off.

anchan42 - Strange about Oxford - have you disabled other dictionaries for use in the document reader (via Manage Dicts)? Those selections apply in the popup definitions too.
 

anchan42

探花
mikelove said:
anchan42 - Strange about Oxford - have you disabled other dictionaries for use in the document reader (via Manage Dicts)? Those selections apply in the popup definitions too.

You are right. I did have ABC disable. Problem solved now. Thanks.. :D
 

daniu

榜眼
mikelove said:
daniu - eek, right, that is bad - found/fixed that problem now, sorry our regression testing missed it. Have you had any other flashcard display problems aside from answer boxes covering each other up in Free-answer?

Sorry - but with this mistake as I said ... that beta becomes useless and I switched back. If you give me a new version I am very willing to test that again ... I like the new flashcard system very much though and could not find much problems in the 7b version (don't really get why you don't call it 8, 9, 10 ...).
Just one other thing: today I switched the "prompt for answer quality" on and I am pretty confused cause it prompts me for 4, 5 and 6 ... Now - sorry but I don't have a glue what to do with that. In Germany the best grade in school is 1, the worst is 6 (in the later years 15 is best while 0 would be worst), AFAIK in the US the best is 100, worst is 0, I also know that some countries use systems where 6 is best - 1 worst. So - asking for 4, 5 or 6 does not tell me anything - I only assume that 5 would be medium :)
I also miss a possibility to declare my answer as right or wrong despite what pleco says ... sometimes I point to the wrong place by accident. I know this would tempt to cheat (as I realized that I did before quite a bit ...) but I think it would help anyways ... for example also for the cases where Taiwan Mandarin differs from Mainland China Mandarin. If I am correct then Mainland Chinese tend to give the second character of a word no emphasize while Taiwanese still would emphasize as usual (eg: zhi1dao4 - in TW versus zhi1dao5 in CN)
The opposite - declaring the answer as wrong would be convenient because sometimes I only roughly know how to write the character - so I still try and find the character in the box but I feel like it would be better to rate it as failed (might do this by not choosing the character in the handwriting recognition but it is too tempting ...).

regards
Daniel
 
7(c) crash. I had been using it for about 20 minutes sporadically looking up words and saving to different categories.

My hand brushed across the top right, and it sent the current entry to the reader. I tried to adjust the size of the dictionary screen (bottom part of reader) and it crashed. Note that I did not highlight any words, and that the dictionary portion was still basically "empty"
 
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