Beta 7(d) Bug Report Thread

[ldolse]

IA when Pleco is already running in the background seems a bit slower than it did with previous releases. Not horribly slow, just a bit.
That said, it was slow enough that I clicked the button a couple times trying to get it to come up. That brought up the IA popup and then immediately covered the IA popup with the full Pleco window. After minimizing Pleco by clicking OK the IA popup was still waiting in the background.

 

[The Duelist]

Bug Report: Tapping The Toolbar:Toggle List Icon, Closes Small Screen Minimized HWR Input.

If I Have The Minimized HWR & List Panels Open On Small Screen,
When I Tap The Toolbar 'Toggle List' Icon,
The HWR Panel Closes.
I Expected Only The List Panel To Open/Close When I Tap The 'Toggle List' Icon.

Platform: Palm T5
Software: PD2b7(d)

 

[ipsi]

How much memory is Pleco expected/supposed to use? It's currently sitting at just under 6MB (6082KB), more about twice FlexMail (at 3036KB). Most of that seems to be audio files being stored in memory and not released after use. On the other hand, memory's not leaking, just not being released as it doesn't keep going up when I play the same sound again and again. I guess the rest is dictionaries and flashcards and whatnot being cached in memory?

Is there an upper limit on how much memory Pleco will consume? I don't really fancy the idea of it managing to load all of 21st Century into memory at once .

Bit of browsing of large dictionary entries (common words like 'run' or 'go' in the 21st Century) has brought it up to 7100KB.

EDIT: While I'm at it, I really like the Pro. I kinda miss some things about Palm OS (like the clean screen redraws and the prettier Pleco), but I don't really miss it. The overall power of Windows Mobile more than makes up for it (plus having stuff like 3G is great).

 

[mikelove]

ipsi - yeah, we're seeing that issue with changing scoring here too now actually - only seems to affect certain devices though. I think we've got a pretty good idea what's causing it, though.

There is indeed an upper limit to cache memory usage - it'll cache up to 128 data blocks; in dictionaries those blocks normally top out at around 16K but in audio files thanks to some extra data compression we do they can go as high as 40 or 50 k, so if you've just listened to a lot of audio files it's possible there could be some big records loaded from those that have yet to be flushed from the cache. Along with that there's also the font cache which FreeType keeps independently, so between those and other program execution memory it's not unreasonable that the memory usage could get up to 7 MB - the font cache has a considerably bigger footprint on systems with larger screens like the Treo Pro because at anything above 240x320 Chinese characters are all being cached as outlines instead of bitmaps (since there aren't any embedded bitmaps in the font large enough for those screens), on low-res systems the memory usage usually doesn't get above about 5.5 MB.

ldolse - that's odd... is the open-reader-on-clipboard option working correctly again? Perhaps there's something in that change that's causing the slowdown.

The Duelist - yikes, seeing a couple of new bugs in the hide-on-small-screen option actually - not sure where those came from.

 

[ipsi]

Ahh, that makes sense. Just so long as it doesn't consume all my memoy, I'll be happy .

 

[ldolse]

Loading clipboard contents on activate is working properly again, yes. IA just seems slower. It used to seem pretty much instant as long as Pleco was already running in the background. Now it takes ~1.5 seconds.

 

[ipsi]

Here's a random bug:

When entering Chinese characters into the pronunciation field of a C -> E flashcard, the last character (whatever it is) is not displayed in the Flashcard Info screen, though it is on the Manage Flashcards screen, but not in a flashcard session. Kinda odd, though the only use that comes to mind is trying to remember the pronunciation of a character in terms of another (e.g. Trying to remember that 做 is pronounced like 坐 or 座), though I can't say I see that being a popular use of flashcards. No problems with Pinyin or Zhuyin. Could be worked around by appending a number or something to the end.

EDIT: e.g. having fields of '做／坐／To do; to make' results in a display of '做//To do; to make'. Also, it only displays on the Manage Flashcards screen if you're not showing the full card (i.e. you have two columns).

Actually came across this entering Hirigana/Katakana into the Pron field (which works fine, apart from the above issue. Even searches nicely (but only in the flashcards module) ), just for fun.

Also, when you change change from Pinyin w/ tones to Pinyin w/ Numbers or Zhuyin, everything's updated except the dictionary entry currently displaying. Have to scroll up/down an entry before it takes effect.

 

[Shadowdh]

Further to my bit about the eraser deleting all the characters in the lookup bar, if you highlight the ones you want to keep and then hit the arrow key next to the eraser it keeps the ones you highlight... so far its running pretty smoothly for me... I have yet to run into any major issues... I am still playing and will make more notes if anything crops up...

 

[risandres]

Hi,

I'm using Pleco 2 Beta 7(d) in Palm Tungsten E2 with CJKOS/PenP.

The little issues I've found are:

One. In Preferences > Search Paths, the last Search Path option (of the three you can edit the path) cannot personalize the path because when you change the path to, for example, "/docs/", after reset Pleco 2, it's renamed to "/docs//Pleco/", making useless. Doing the same in the second option, it worked as expected.

Two. If Preferences > External > Input Field Compatibility Mode (Big5), and Preferences > Input > Auto-enter best HWR match (after Never), are both activated, I found an issue with the Dictionary Main View "Search Input Field" (where you write the word to look up). It looks to be working normal, but when you use the internal HWR recognized (versus the external CJKOS/PenP), and you want to rectify the best HWR match, the "Search Input Field" get character encoding messy.
I guess this last problem can be solved avoiding to activate "Auto-enter best..." at the same time the "Input Field ...", because there are not important to have the two options at the same time.

By the other hand, I feel gladding to see the other problem I report in Beta 7b is already fine to see traditional characters in Char Info > Compounds.

And from then, I am only using Pleco 2 Beta, it is stable to use in my everyday use. Is similar quickly searching than Pleco 1, although slower starting and ending, but I like the new bonuses. I've found when the memory down to about 1,5MB, the search query is too slow and it's worth to do a soft reset. But I think the memory down because in my dairy use I open a serie of other programs in my Palm, not for memory leaking.

As a user of Palm Tungsten E2, I feel is ready to go. Though I haven't time to play now with the flashcards to have an opinion.

 

[radioman]

If I go to make a custom card, where I can input Chinese, Pronunciation, Defn - If I just put in text in Pron: "rob" and Defn: "teacher at starbucks", with no Hanzi, and hit done, the program locks up and freezes the screen. I can still stare at the words "rob" and " teacher at starbucks". But the screen appears forever frozen where I have to reset off the back of the E2 to get it moving. (yes, I use Pleco for more than straight Chinese )

Not sure that this was the ultimate intent of the flashcards but it was useful in version 1. I am thinking that the whole system probably should not seize up with some of the fields left blank.

 

[mikelove]

ldolse - I checked this on WM6 here and it doesn't seem to be doing anything it wasn't doing before; have you made any other changes to your system configuration recently?

ipsi - and the case for making Pleco flashcards available as a separate application continues to build We'll take a look to make sure this isn't a symptom of a bigger bug - the /es shouldn't be getting cut out in custom flashcards anymore, so I'm not sure what's going on there, and the Pinyin field has never actually been tested with characters but since it uses pretty much the same function to sanitize input that the headword does it shouldn't be cutting out those trailing characters.

risandres - I'm glad to hear you think it's ready, particularly on the oft-troublesome E2. We'll take a look at these two bugs - the auto-enter HWR issue is probably just a matter of deleting two characters (or three with UTF-8) instead of one when IF Compatibility is turned on.

radioman - yeah, that definitely shouldn't be freezing up. Hmm...

 

[johnowenschina]

I especially like the Compounds tab page of the Char Info screen. I know that this is not really a "bug", but it does restrict the use of the "Compounds" screen. Quite often I cannot view the full pinyin and almost never can view the full definition fields of these list boxes, even though there is a lot of empty space on the screen. [Empty space at the bottom in portrait mode and on the right in landscape mode] See 2 attachments (portrait and landscape) sent to your email address.

It seems to me, maybe I am wrong, that you could very easily modify these 2 list boxes by either adding user ability to resize (vertically and horizontally) the list boxes OR at the least adding a horizontal scroll slider.

Alternately, you could resize the list boxes at runtime based on the user's screen size.

It seems that Pleco handles resizing well in both portrait and landscape modes, with the exception of the Char Info screen, particularly the Compounds tab page.

It would be nice to enable text wrapping too. Besides that I haven't found any problems, except intermittent crashes which I cannot not narrow down to any specific action.

 

[mikelove]

Screen resizing code is actually really hard to get right, particularly since the aspect ratio varies slightly between Palm and WM - even the simple list resize on Manage Flashcards took a lot of work, and getting Input resizing correctly on WM proved so aggravating that we eventually just gave up and left it square-screen-only in 2.0. The Compounds tab could use a bunch of improvements in general (popup dictionary entries, letting one list take up the full screen, faster searches, etc) so I'd rather not go to the trouble of implementing screen resize on that until we're making those changes as well - otherwise we'd just have to do it again once we update the rest of the screen.

Sorry about the intermittent crashes - how often would you say you're seeing those?

 

[ipsi]

I think my example may have been a tad confusing, sorry. What I meant was that a card of the form "Head/SingleCharAsPron/Defn", e.g. "做/坐/To do; to make" results in a display of "Head//Defn", e.g. "做//To do; to make". Essentially, providing a single character like 坐 as the pronunciation results in it not displaying the character at all. Nothing to do with /'s .

 

[stephanhodges]

I cannot get a flashcard session to show all the words in the order that I entered them. If a word is a "duplicate", then those words all come first (presumably because they were "entered" much earlier, rather when added to this category.

I CAN see all words in the order entered when looking at the Manage Flashcards screen (but they are too small and not suitable for review, self-test, etc), so it seems like the system is able to sort and present the words in this ordering.

Perhaps I am just doing something incorrect. I've tried setting to fixed, random, etc. as document seems to suggest to effect this...

 

[johnowenschina]

Screen resizing code is actually really hard to get right, particularly since the aspect ratio varies slightly between Palm and WM - even the simple list resize on Manage Flashcards took a lot of work, and getting Input resizing correctly on WM proved so aggravating that we eventually just gave up and left it square-screen-only in 2.0. The Compounds tab could use a bunch of improvements in general (popup dictionary entries, letting one list take up the full screen, faster searches, etc) so I'd rather not go to the trouble of implementing screen resize on that until we're making those changes as well - otherwise we'd just have to do it again once we update the rest of the screen.

Sorry about the intermittent crashes - how often would you say you're seeing those?

Thanks Mike. Well what about adding a Horizonal Scroll Slider to the lists. This way I can still view the full listing.
Also, couldn't you just Dock the list boxes on the left and right. I think that would take care of the automatic resizing horizonally. I know I can do this on a Desktop Window program. I looked in Visual Studio and they have both the "Dock" properties and the "Horizonal Scroll" tool in the WM tools list. I'm not a WM programer though, so maybe this works differently.

 

[hairyleprechaun]

Hey Mike,

I just noticed that the "Hide Input on small screen" is no longer working. I was using it before installing beta 7(d), and cannot remember if it ever worked properly after installing beta 7(d) or if the bug just now popped up.

hp iPaq hx2495 WM 5

Darrol

 

[weight]

Hi Mike,

Zhuyin searches were working before but it seems broken now on my 7(d) - possibly broken many releases ago as I haven't tried it in a while. For any search all that comes up is "no matches."

Thanks

 

[mikelove]

ipsi - ah, that explains it. It turns out there was a bug that could cause the last character to get truncated from the Pinyin field (which in the case of 做/坐/To do was the only character) so it looks like we've got this fixed now.

stephanhodges - this is actually a feature request and not a bug - the flashcard session SQL query is structured very differently from the Manage Cards one, and there's not really a good way for us to sort cards in it by the order in which they were assigned to categories (at least not without making it dramatically more complicated / buggy / slow). Sorting cards by the order in which they were created is much easier since that order is reflected in the ID codes of the cards. On top of which, the whole idea of sorting cards by category assignment order would be thrown off by sessions with more than one category, particularly with cards in it that belonged to more than one of the eligible categories. So this would probably only appear in conjunction with the possibly-coming-in-2.1 "sorted categories" feature. Though as I've said before, pedagogically I'm not a big fan of having cards appear in a consistent order at all, since it can only hurt memorization to study them that way - in real-world Chinese you don't always see 妈妈 immediately after 爸爸, and seeing them that way in a vocabulary list may make it harder for you to remember 妈妈 independently.

johnowenschina - adding a horizontal scrollbar would actually be decidedly non-trivial, since we use a custom Pleco-created user interface control for those lists and we haven't yet added horizontal scrolling support to that control. Docking only works with Windows Forms, which we unfortunately can't use since they're only available in .NET.

hairyleprechaun - yeah, The Duelist mentioned a similar problem with that - made a change in b7d which unfortunately screwed up all of that hide-input code so we're going back to the old way of doing things in b8.

weight - looks like we forgot to include Zhuyin characters in our new code which checks to make sure the Input Field has something Pleco can actually search for (letters or Chinese characters) before running a search - this will be fixed in b8.

 

[ipsi]

Good to see . I actually recall a similar bug a few betas back where it was doing something similar, but with Pinyin and tones or something.