Feature request (various things)

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
@ACardiganAndAFrown - the impression I get from a number of people is that the MC pronunciations from SDCMC are at best controversial and at worst brazenly inaccurate, so I'm not inclined to promote them to the top until we have MC pronunciation data our legions of curmudgeonly Sinologist users are slightly more okay with :)
 

gregl6981

Member
Just on the thesaurus, can anyone confirm what this is/was? I've been searching desperately for a Chinese thesaurus (including in hard copy if necessary), including by asking my very well-educated Chinese wife, to no avail!

Thanks
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It was mostly based on a licensed 反义词词典 from SFLEP - we dropped it because we were only using a small portion of it and couldn't justify continuing to pay annual license fees for it nor did we feel it reliable / valuable enough for us to be able to start charging for it. We'd like to develop our own thesaurus eventually but don't have a specific plan on that yet.
 

bokane

举人
@ACardiganAndAFrown - the impression I get from a number of people is that the MC pronunciations from SDCMC are at best controversial and at worst brazenly inaccurate,

Whoa now! That seems...questionable on a couple of fronts. (Disclaimer: I don't really know what I'm talking about.)
SDCMC entries don't have pronunciations; the MC is just from Baxter's transcription of the rhyme table data. It's phonemic, not phonetic: when SDCMC says that 東 is "tuwng," it's just presenting the same information as the traditional Guangyun entry's "德紅切," without making specific claims about what something with the initial consonant of 德 and the rhyme of 紅 sounded like. Karlgren and Pulleyblank both attempted to reconstruct the actual phonetic values of the syllables represented by these characters, but the standard approach these days is to go for something phonemic based on data from Guangyun etc. So there's not really much controversy over it, as far as I understand it: it's just a transcription. The only way it might be inaccurate would be if there had been data entry errors.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Sorry, should have said 'reading' instead of 'pronunciation.' And I'm considerably less of an expert than you, I just know a bunch of people who seem to know what they're talking about have written me to complain about those MC readings. (they may in fact all be crackpots - we have no shortage of those, I've got one guy who sends me profanity-laced tirades every couple of months because of his scholarly objections to a few of the dictionaries in our catalog)
 

bokane

举人
Oh, neat! I've got no real understanding of this stuff, so they may well all be right in different ways. Profound, non-ironic respect to anyone who can get worked up into a profane frenzy over chongniu doublets. I aspire to that myself some day, though for the time being I'm mostly glad that I do 17th century literature instead of historical linguistics.
 

Dodoxo

举人
I think it would be extremely useful to add a search characters or words function in a deck. I usually study using sentence cards and I would like to search for a word that I already used in a different phrase in order to check the different use of it in a different context.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Nope. But I’d say that even if I thought it was a week away :) Still planning to have it fall out of the sky one day without any warning.
 

archimon

Member
Hey - would it be possible to make it so that when you long-press the name of a dictionary in the definition pop-up (i.e., when reading a book or looking at an example sentence and you highlight a word), only dictionaries with definitions/entries for that word appear? I frequently read classical texts in Pleco, and try to switch to dictionaries only to find there is no definition available. It would be a great little time-saver not to have to cycle through the dictionaries every time and just to be informed immediately which have entries available.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Would this be for the currently highlighted word? (not dictionaries that have a match of any length for the current word but one that match the current length exactly?)
 

rizen suha

状元
feature request. screen reader. just reminding pleco that i badly want the highlighting be white instead of grey. ie same color as the pop up box. as it is now, with the current forced upon "contrast reduction" my vision is strained, especially when reading outdoor. only compensation is to turn brightness way up. not ecological and not logical. and also looking fwd to getting that pop up some 60% bigger:-| and also some enhanced placement of the pop up so that the looked up text will not be covered by the pop up. many many thanks
 

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mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
This is still HTML, right? Main problem there is how we change the color of characters on the page instead of just tinting them as we do now - it's easy to draw a translucent gray box over something, it's much harder to invert the colors of that something without modifying the original HTML (which we've found to be problematic on newer dynamic pages where things keep being refreshed / otherwise mucked with and our modifications either go away too soon or linger too long).
 

rizen suha

状元
thanks, this is with an e-pub. how about making the box 100% translucent:)? and, if that does not give you "white" but the color of the slightly dimmed background, it would still be much better than "grey-down-lighting". (and, also in that case, put a [perhaps white] border on the highlighted box to differentiate it from the background).
 
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rizen suha

状元
or how about just underlining instead of highlighting. that would be the cleanest of all solutions. perhaps along with the option to not dim out the background (while selecting a text).
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Underlining of Chinese characters never works very well visually, at least not to me - takes too long to register them as highlighted.

Option to disable translucent dimming: I'm reluctant to go against Apple UI guidelines on that one, at least unless a *lot* of other users complain about it. When you're layering white boxes on white backgrounds you kind of do want something to set off the foreground slightly and that's the way they currently do it. (I'm hoping iOS 12 brings back shadows in a more aggressive way or does something else to provide us with a better alternative to the current approach)
 
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