Palm Supermemo > iPhone Pleco Flashcards Import

[jhbiddle]

Dear Plecans,

I am coming over from Palm world, and bringing a pile of flashcards from Supermemo.

I have spent the last 8+ hours getting it all working - so thought I would share.

- Exported my PDB file to CSV using this tool at http://www.reavesmd.com/software/.
- Followed this forum instructions here http://www.plecoforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1366&p=8728&hilit=babelpad#p8728 to sort the Unicode.
- Open in Babelpad - http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Software/BabelPad.html
- Paste into Excel, and spend some time sorting out some of the formatting issues. Add // Category Titles.
- Save out from Babelpad as UTF-8 TXT
- Upload to iPhone, selecting appropriate UTF-8 format etc. Let Pleco choose the dictionary definition as preferred, and this seems to convert my old Zhuyin into Pinyin, with only a few errors. I lose some of my old additions and notes, but I don't care if it means I don't need to scrub the broken Zhuyin Fuhao.

- (Tried using Open Office to sort my Unicode issues out, but no dice. Use Babelpad!)


So, my only issue has been garbled BoPoMoFo. I thought it was supposed to be working in 2.0?


Anyway - very nice product. Just wish the Pinyin input on iPhone was as good as the Palm; I preferred the ability of being able to enter tones or no tones as I saw fit, and adding my own idioms. Wonder if it will improve in iPhone 4.0.


Any extra notes let me know.

Jonathan

 

[jhbiddle]

And just as a follow-up, I am using http://www.mandarintools.com/pyconverter.html to convert my old Bopomofo into Pinyin. Still some transfer mistakes, but I can live with that.

掉下去 diào xià qù To drop
順利 shùn ㄌㄧˋ To go smoothly
分開 fēn kāi To separate (something)
交換 jiāo huàn To swap (two things)
切換 qīㄝ huàn To switch

Cheers,

Jonathan

 

[mikelove]

Thanks for the feedback.

On the garbled BoPoMoFo front, how exactly was it garbled by Pleco? The display of it should work fine, but to be honest we've done very little testing with BoPoMoFo imports, so it's possible there might be some bugs left on those...

As for your other issues, if you jailbreak your iPhone (dicey proposition though that is) that will let you install a third-party Pinyin input method - those should be just as customizable as what you had on Palm. OS 4 is adding customizable dictionary support for English at least, that's been widely reported; whether or not it works for Pinyin is something I can't talk about, since I haven't seen any published reports about it and OS 4 is technically under NDA (meaning I can't talk about anything unless someone else has already violated their NDA by blabbing about that thing in public).

 

[jhbiddle]

Trying to replicate and take a screenshot, but naturally it is now working.

From what I remember, it was importing the Bopomofo as pidgin Pinyin, and making some mistakes where there were spaces between zhuyin 'letters'. Is that possible?

I will try to replicate again with one of the old txt files and send a screen shot.

 

[mikelove]

Actually it looks like we may not have implemented support for Zhuyin in flashcard imports yet - for some reason I thought we had but I'm not seeing it now. So the reason you only ended up with funny-looking imports in only a few cases is that whenever it found a dictionary match for the characters it went with that (just interpreted the Zhuyin as gibberish and replaced it with the Pinyin from the dictionary entry). Anyway, we'll put Zhuyin imports on the to-do list for 2.2.

 

[zzztriple]

Jonathan, thanks for sharing the tips.

I'm trying to convert my pdb collections via ReavesMD but got stonewalled with 404 http errors. Wonder if it blocks access from the US? Would be obliged if you could provide alternative link.

Thanks!
zzz