Educational discount?

Lurks

探花
Having given the OCR a spin on the Android beta, it's clear that it's excellent on my N1 camera in exactly the way that the iPod's isn't. Otherwise instant impressions are: Oh god the same nasty iOS font but yay a 'night mode' battery saver on OLED screens.

At any rate given the amount of obscure Chinese texts I'm reading, the OCR would be very handy and, well, having Pleco on my actual phone is bound to be helpful too. That said there's not a hope in hell I'd transfer the license from my iPod Pleco appliance so I find myself in the situation of needing to buy Pleco afresh.

Since I'm a massively skint student these days I'm still not so I sure I can justify it but a discount might swing it. Any chance Mike?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Lurks said:
Having given the OCR a spin on the Android beta, it's clear that it's excellent on my N1 camera in exactly the way that the iPod's isn't. Otherwise instant impressions are: Oh god the same nasty iOS font but yay a 'night mode' battery saver on OLED screens.

Thanks! I'm hoping Android pressure inspires Apple to give the iPad 3 and iPod Touch 2011 autofocus cameras, but they'll only do that if they can manage it without adding 1 mm to their case sizes...

Re the font, we're just using Droid Sans Fallback like everybody else... would you prefer a SongTi-style font like on WM? It's certainly feasible for us to license one of those - in fact we could even swing it on iOS now - but it seems like the consensus has been that HeiTi fonts are more readable on mobile displays; have you tried replacing your Android system font to see if you like a Song one better?

Lurks said:
At any rate given the amount of obscure Chinese texts I'm reading, the OCR would be very handy and, well, having Pleco on my actual phone is bound to be helpful too. That said there's not a hope in hell I'd transfer the license from my iPod Pleco appliance so I find myself in the situation of needing to buy Pleco afresh.

Since I'm a massively skint student these days I'm still not so I sure I can justify it but a discount might swing it. Any chance Mike?

We might be able to offer a review copy in your case, actually - email or PM me and we'll sort out something.
 

Lurks

探花
Not putting a decent camera in iPods is a bit rough really. It's not like the things don't cost the money to justify it. Ah well.

I'm a bit baffled re the font. It doesn't just look similar, it looks identical. I actually looked at them side by side which is why I thought you had moved across the same font. But somewhat embarrassingly I've just noticed the same font is in Hanping too so there you go... I guess that shows how little I do Chinese stuff on Android...

I can certainly see how heiti is more readable but I'd argue that's really down to resolution. On the low-res iPod I could certainly see why heiti would be necessary but now all high-end smartphones have high res screens and so do the iPods. I really miss how lovely Pleco looked on my old touch HD. I think it would look gorgeous on the high-res displays on the iOS stuff, better than on my N1's aging OLED.

I would also argue there's good reason to view Chinese in an education/reference app in some manner which is showing strokes correctly. I have on a good many occasions used the zoom function to show a word to students or lecturers but the display you get by clicking stroke order is actually better because the zoomed up font uses the comedy heiti job, the stroke order doesn't.

Fangsong is probably the wrong end of the scale for mobile though. Just naming some common Windows ones, there's some good compromises like MingLiu. KaiTi is virtually as thick as heiti, great for subtitles!

Anyway, time to stop guessing and give it a go since you can actually do this sort of thing on Android. Here's a couple of screenshots of Pleco and Hanping after I replaced the droidsansfallback.ttf with the kaiti out of windows.
http://www.plothatching.com/chinesefiles/pleco.png
http://www.plothatching.com/chinesefiles/hanping.png

I'm very pleased with this so thanks for giving me the idea! :) Now my lovely Hanping powered homescreen widgets are also using the font.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Lurks said:
I'm a bit baffled re the font. It doesn't just look similar, it looks identical. I actually looked at them side by side which is why I thought you had moved across the same font. But somewhat embarrassingly I've just noticed the same font is in Hanping too so there you go... I guess that shows how little I do Chinese stuff on Android...

They are very similar, yes... I believe they were sourced from different foundries so it may simply be that medium-weight HeiTi fonts are very difficult to tell apart.

Lurks said:
I would also argue there's good reason to view Chinese in an education/reference app in some manner which is showing strokes correctly. I have on a good many occasions used the zoom function to show a word to students or lecturers but the display you get by clicking stroke order is actually better because the zoomed up font uses the comedy heiti job, the stroke order doesn't.

That I agree on, I'm just not sure if it's worth spending somewhere in the vicinity of $10,000/year to license a more stroke-y Chinese font; it probably is at least worth giving users a way to more easily plug in a font they supply themselves, though.

Lurks said:
Here's a couple of screenshots of Pleco

Thanks - I like the pastel tone color scheme, though it probably only makes sense in Night Mode.

sofamensch said:
You just crossed out the topic, which was would you give educational discount to the bundles

We will, we just aren't yet, since a) we're running on a very temporary / soon-to-be-replaced online store platform and b) we're still trying to sort out exactly what sort of documentation we'd need to ask for. (on iOS the "honor system" is really the only way to offer an educational discount while staying in compliance with Apple's rules)
 

sinolog

Member
We will, we just aren't yet, since a) we're running on a very temporary / soon-to-be-replaced online store platform and b) we're still trying to sort out exactly what sort of documentation we'd need to ask for. (on iOS the "honor system" is really the only way to offer an educational discount while staying in compliance with Apple's rules)

Would it be ok to send in a student ID at all? Or maybe an email from an approved University e-mailbox? Not really anything else coming to my mind - it's late here... :roll:
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
sinolog said:
Would it be ok to send in a student ID at all? Or maybe an email from an approved University e-mailbox? Not really anything else coming to my mind - it's late here... :roll:

We haven't even decided on student pricing yet, actually - there are a couple of licensing changes in the works that might affect what our discounted prices can / ought to be - so even with a valid student ID we're not sure what we'd charge you.
 

Zeldor

举人
So if I want educational discount [will it work for any student from any country?] I should wait with purchasing my license?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Zeldor said:
So if I want educational discount [will it work for any student from any country?] I should wait with purchasing my license?

Yes, though we're not 100% sure we're even going to offer them on Android - there's been some discussion here of simply setting our Android prices somewhere halfway between the educational and non-educational prices we offer on iOS and charging everyone the same price. (more than half of our customers are students or teachers of some kind or another, so it seems like this would save a lot of paperwork on both sides)
 

kiraven

举人
Are there any news regarding the educational discount for Pleco’s Android Version? If not, how long will it approximately take till it is decided?

If I buy a normal bundle now, is there any chance that, if a discount is introduced, the difference can be refunded if a proper proof is provided?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
kiraven said:
Are there any news regarding the educational discount for Pleco’s Android Version? If not, how long will it approximately take till it is decided?

If I buy a normal bundle now, is there any chance that, if a discount is introduced, the difference can be refunded if a proper proof is provided?

I'm afraid I don't have anything new to say on that - I'd really rather not make any promises about future refunds since people don't tend to read these things very carefully and someone might assume they are getting a refund even if we decide not to offer educational discounts at all.
 
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