Pleco C-E as first choice for E-C?

[Martin]

Although obviously it is a Chinese to English dictionary type, I prefer using Pleco C-E with full text search as primary English-Chinese dictionary as well. Is there any way to permanently set it up this way so that I do not always have to switch away from NWP?

Otherwise thank you very much for this great program. Fiddling around only with a crappy Casio and a paper dictionary just two months ago, I did not know how easy and efficient it could be to look up and practice Chinese characters/words. Well worth buying an iTouch just for the purpose of this tool.

 

[mikelove]

Although obviously it is a Chinese to English dictionary type, I prefer using Pleco C-E with full text search as primary English-Chinese dictionary as well. Is there any way to permanently set it up this way so that I do not always have to switch away from NWP?

Unfortunately no, we don't have an option for that at the moment - to be honest I don't think anybody's ever asked for it before. We'll check and see whether it's feasible to add support for this in a 2.2.x / 2.3 update.

Otherwise thank you very much for this great program. Fiddling around only with a crappy Casio and a paper dictionary just two months ago, I did not know how easy and efficient it could be to look up and practice Chinese characters/words. Well worth buying an iTouch just for the purpose of this tool.

Thank you!

 

[x2o]

I second this. The NWP dictionary entries are often a wall of black text...I also prefer to use the Pleco dictionary most of the time.

 

[Martin]

"A wall of text" describes it well. I see two main advantages using Pleco C-E the other way round:

1. Easy to read and distinct Hanzi can be displayed in larger font size

2. I can directly add it to the flashcards, which is not possible with a regular E-C dictionary

 

[mikelove]

1. Easy to read and distinct Hanzi can be displayed in larger font size

2. I can directly add it to the flashcards, which is not possible with a regular E-C dictionary

True on both fronts, though on #2 it's really just one extra step away - tap on the word to highlight it, then tap on the + in the popup reader bar to add it. Readability will be helped once we finally start adding newlines between different parts of definitions in NWP / ABC / 21c as we already do in PLC - there were some legacy reasons not to do that on Palm/WM, but those no longer justify continuing to leave entries this blocky-looking on iPhone / Android.

 

[gary]

Maybe Pleco can remember the selected dictionary. I perfer ABC as my primary and often have to switch from PLC to ABC like if I click a link from an english word in the definition body. Like:

ABC selected both as C->E and E->C
view chinese definition
select english word to look up
search results shown
remove pinyin number cuz I'm trying to look up english
switch from E->C
switch from NWP to ABC even though I had ABC selected and last viewed..

ugh.

 

[mikelove]

switch from NWP to ABC even though I had ABC selected and last viewed..

Have you gone into Settings / Manage Dicts and made ABC your first-ranked E-C dictionary?

The Pinyin tone numbers at the end of English words after "search for" are a bug - thanks for the note on that, not sure why we didn't discover it before now.

 

[gary]

Thanks Mike.

I think it would be nice also to have pleco remember the last used dictionary. It seems like for usability, it's a good choice.

 

[mikelove]

I think it would be nice also to have pleco remember the last used dictionary. It seems like for usability, it's a good choice.

Yeah, that one looks like a bug - might be specifically relating to that extra 5 but the way the design works now it should already be going back to your first E-C dictionary. Anyway we'll investigate further though the fix for this may be thorny enough that it has to wait for 2.3... thanks.