how to copy characters to input box ...

[rjanosy]

I have a question (or a dissatisfaction) with the Android version of Pleco.


In the Palm version, we had a special button called the ‘copy to input field’ button which was very useful. It allowed us to buildup words if we didn’t know the exact complete word, use wildcards and combine pinyin with characters in the input field. I could for example find one word and then erase one character and add another one and play with my searches.

The android version seems much more limited in that regard. Maybe I just don’t know how to put a ‘found character’ into the input field.


Is there a way of doing that?


Thank you.

 

[mikelove]

Tap on the character to select it, then tap on the search icon (magnifying glass).

 

[Scoox]

I switched my Pleco license from Palm OS to Android yesterday. After playing with it for a while, I am finding it very limiting, and the biggest problem that keeps cropping up is Pleco's inability to copy any part of the definition text to the input box, including non-adjacent text. I must be doing something wrong, because this has been possible on Palm OS for as long as I can remember.

If this is not possible I don't see how Pleco can work for me or anyone coming from Palm OS. I never really felt the need to upgrade from Palm OS, other than the fact that it is nice having everything on one little device.

 

[mikelove]

Did the above procedure not work for you? Just tap on a character or word to select it, then tap on the magnifying glass icon to copy the selection to the input box.

 

[Scoox]

Hi, thanks for replying. Pleco only copies one character (for one-character words) or multiple characters when the tapped word is made up of more than one character. I am unable to copy English words or pinyin, or characters that are not next to each other in the definition text.

 

[mikelove]

With "characters that are not next to each other," how were you able to do that in our old app? There's never been support for non-contiguous selection.

As far as English and Pinyin, to be honest we just haven't seen any interest in easily copying those to the search field - in fact, in the nearly 3 years our Android app has been available I can't remember a single other person mentioning it. We made a conscious decision not to support tap selection of English/Pinyin when we moved to capacitive (non-stylus-based) touchscreens because it's much harder to aim taps accurately - limiting it to only characters meant fewer mistakes - so changing that would have to be done through an off-by-default option since it would make life noticeably worse for people who only want to select characters.

We are adding tap-hold text selection to text fields in our next big update, though, so with a few extra button presses you could copy text to the search field through that. (tap-hold word to highlight, tap the copy button, tap somewhere to dismiss, go back to the search screen and paste it in) If a faster version of this is really important to you then I'd suggest trading in your Android device for an iOS one, as our iOS software supports this more seamlessly (tap-hold text to select, then tap on the search button) - on iOS we use entirely our own system for presenting formatted text, so we can hack whatever functionality into text selection we like, while on Android we're stuck with what Google gives us and hence the potential for modification is much more limited.

 

[Scoox]

On Palm OS I was able to manipulate non-contiguous text in two ways:

1) If I wanted to copy "betty bitter" from the much longer string "betty bought a bit of butter but she found the butter bitter", I could select the entire block of text, copy it to the input box and then delete the bit in the middle,
2) ... or I could select "bitter", copy it using the system clipboard, then copy "betty" to the input box using Pleco's built in "copy to input" command, and finally paste "bitter" from the system clipboard.

Being able to copy entire sentences from the definition text can be useful, for instance, if you want to use the text in a email or a text message, or even to copy the pinyin which otherwise would require a third-party input method.

I agree that capacitive touch-screens are clumsy for selecting text. There will always be situations where a stylus would have been more adequate, for the same reason tweezers were invented a very long time ago and continue to be used for manipulating small objects. But either way it seems a natural thing to do to copy text from dictionary definitions, and not surprisingly every other dictionary I have ever used allowed me to select and copy text, so hopefully you guys will find a way to implement this in the future, otherwise I might have to get an iOS device.

 

[mikelove]

Well as I said, we are adding support for copying it to the clipboard at least in our next update; we didn't support it before now mainly because of some issues on some older versions of Android that we're now dropping support for. But there's no good way to add a "copy to search box" button to Android's text selection interface.

You can copy the headword or pronunciation or the full entry from a search result by tap-holding on it and selecting the appropriate menu item - no need to fiddle around with text selection at all for that.

 

[Scoox]

Sorry for the late reply. I should have read that more carefully, it was very late at that time, my humble apologies. That's great news then!

Will it be possible to select and copy headword text too? At the moment only single-character definitions are possible there. It works fine on the rest of the definition text though, where I am able to pop up a definition for multiple contiguous characters by means of a single tap.

Thank you!

 

[mikelove]

You can select more than one character in the headword already, just tap on the |-> button. We select a single character by default to make it extra easy to look up the meaning for any character in the headword (since you already have the definition for the entire thing in front of you). You can copy headword text without even doing that via the appropriate command in the menu at the top right corner of the screen.

 

[Scoox]

Great! I am liking it more and more. I am so set in my Palm OS habits that I instinctively expect things to work the old way. I guess I should go RTFM first