Feature req: Testing Chinese character writing?

[mnanon]

Not sure if it already exists in Pleco.

With Pleco having the stroke order information with a good handwriting engine; it would seem natural to have the ability test user's Chinese character writing. Does this feature exist in Pleco?

 

[mikelove]

With Pleco having the stroke order information with a good handwriting engine; it would seem natural to have the ability test user's Chinese character writing. Does this feature exist in Pleco?

No, we'd actually need a very different handwriting engine for that - the basic concept of comparing what the user drew against a template and scoring how well they match is similar, but the template has to be a lot stricter and we're only matching against one character instead of thousands. There are also some dicey issues concerning regional variations in stroke order / character style that users would likely be much less forgiving of in a testing scenario than they are when simply viewing stroke order diagrams.

 

[mnanon]

I see, thank you for explaining.

Any plans in developing such add-on feature to Pleco? Isn't there an ("official") 'authoritative' for education in China which covers issues such as stroke order?

 

[mikelove]

Any plans in developing such add-on feature to Pleco?

Maybe, but it's not a high priority at the moment - the availability of the uber-popular Skritter app on iPhone means that this would primarily be of interest to Android users, and it's tough to justify licensing / developing the necessary algorithm + data for Android alone.

Isn't there an ("official") 'authoritative' for education in China which covers issues such as stroke order?

Sure, but if your Chinese teacher was raised in Taiwan you'll end up with a C- and a stern lecture. And actually even among Mandarin speakers there's a lot of variation, official standards notwithstanding - we've had plenty of people write to say that such-and-such order was marked incorrect in spite of the fact that both the mainland and Taiwan standards agree that we have it right. (in some sense the only really authoritative stroke order is "whatever my Chinese teacher says")