Feature request in reader

[Wan]

In a text, words are often interrupted by particles. In the reader, that makes them unaccessible, because when I select them, there’s an additional character in between, and Pleco does not recognize the word.

I would like Pleco to automagically recognize words in the reader when they are separated by particles.

Another very good option would be to add the possibility to, in a string of selected characters, manually deselect characters.
Because most of the time, it is clear which characters form a word or group, even when they are not adjacent.

(I believe I have asked for this feature before, but I’m not sure)

 

[Shun]

I like this idea, and I've often been in this situation, but there is also the possibility of false positives. For example, if we have

暗得很 — "very dark" and
暗很 — a rare and old word meaning "ignorant and stubborn",

then tapping on the 暗 of 暗得很 might get you the definition of the rare second word if you have the Hanyu Da Cidian installed, where you should just get the definition for 暗.

But of course, if you can force Pleco to skip the 了、得、过、or 不 particle, or other elements, by tapping on a button inside the pop-up definition ("Search for word completions"), this wouldn't be an issue.

The main use case you probably mean is when you have a separable V+O verb, like 散步, where you can put elements in between: “散过一次步” or just “散过步”, then such a button could instruct Pleco to look for completions of words starting with the character that was tapped on, within the next 10 characters. I think that would work, instead of a fully automated solution, and it would help a lot compared to copying an expression and deleting the elements in between manually in Dictionary.

Edit: Here are a few other example sentences of word separations from my grammar:

我幽了他一默。 ‘I played a joke on him.’

A: 你真幸运。 ‘You are truly lucky.’
B: 幸什么运! ‘What luck have I got!’

Po-Ching, Yip; Rimmington, Don. Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar (Routledge Comprehensive Grammars) (Kindle Locations 21423-21438). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

 

[mikelove]

Well we do now have some data on this from PLC (the controversial // marks in pinyin) - would make sense to factor that into search, but probably not until a 4.x update.

 

[Shun]

That would be fine with me, but it would include only the words of PLC, not those of the other dictionaries. For those, a kind of "word completion" search in the Document Reader would be great, but I know we had wished for other features in the Pop-up Definition already, so it's probably better to wait for the changes in the next major release and then bring up these kinds of ideas.