Reader: Back button, Title bar taps

Shun

Shun

状元
In the Reader, tapping the title bar takes the view to the very beginning of the document. I think this is an old iOS shortcut that can be found in the iOS Human Interface Guidelines. However, maybe I've already brought it up a few years back, I often accidentally trigger this feature when missing one of the top buttons, and as a result lose my position in the text. Thus, my suggestion would be one or both of the following:

  • Include a Back button that undoes hyperlink jumps inside a PDF document and title bar taps
  • Add an option somewhere to disable the title bar tap feature

Might that be a worthwhile addition/correction to Pleco 4's Reader?

Thanks,

Shun
 
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I'm going to add the rest of my reader feedback here.

Word doc reader bugs:
1. File name after importing is always TF_Template_Word_Windows_2016
2. Text preview in font settings is correct but actual document formatting is not: line height does nothing and font size changes but does not match the scale of the preview. I didn't test more font settings than that.
3. Reading mode is broken. Error: "Sorry, no readable text was found"

PDF reader (with thumbnail bar on) bugs:
1. PDF is not centered on screen
2. Page number does not show even when turned on

And then the following are all feature requests. A lot of these I've posted to the forums before, but you asked us to tell you things we still want after the new update, so here goes. (And thanks for fixing/adding stuff I mentioned before! The app is already fantastic.)

First, one suggestion for Settings: I'd rename "Tone coloring" in settings to something like Colors (tones and tint), or just Colors. I keep forgetting tint is also there.

Reader feature requests:

1. I like how there's no chrome around the show tab bar icon when the tab bar is hidden. I wish it was the same way when the tab bar is shown because that's when the button covers the text.

2. A document type specific to ebooks/epubs would still be nice

3. Option in settings to auto save/load document profiles. This would do as described and also hide the save/load buttons. Alternate implementation: Add a toggle to document settings (with an option to have it on by default for new documents) to auto-save/load. When on, it behaves as described above. This alternate implementation would be preferred for me because then you'd still have the option to have a document with one-off settings without creating a new profile (by turning the toggle off).

4. Ability to reorder (or even hide) sections in the document settings menu (globally, rather than per document). I use that menu a lot. Could even just be with little buttons next to the headers like in the Manage Dictionaries screen in Settings.

5. Ability to customize the top menus that show for pop-up reader and selected text. Specifically, I would want to hide or rearrange the buttons (including moving in/out of the "Share" menu).

6. Add favicons/icons to the look-up options.

7. Define our own look-up options.

8. Option to have the pop-up reader menu attach to the top of the reader bubble to keep it more reachable.

9. When a document is open, single tap (or maybe double tap) the reader button in the bottom tab menu to close the document and return to the bookshelf view. Then another tap to open search like normal.

10. When deleting a reader document, add an option to the confirmation dialogue to delete the original file as well. Meanwhile, it seems like the delete prompt for Clipboard/Web/Live OCR should still be reworded (or changed to a hide function)

11. I'd still love to have an option for an always on tab bar + slider.

12. Add an option to enlarge Chinese text size in the reader pop-up (and also dictionary list) like there is for dictionary body (I realize I can get enlarged Chinese text if I expand the reader bubble, but having it already enlarged in the bubble would be nice).

13. Be able to sort bookshelf by file type

14. Add a "command bar" to the top of the Reader bookshelf (similar to the one in search when you search for a sentence) that has the commands from the open menu for quicker access (ideally customizable, maybe up to two rows so people have space to include "Still OCR" sub-menu options). If that were added, I'd prefer to just keep Clipboard/Web/Live OCR there rather than having them as documents, but I get that they function as documents with document settings, so maybe that doesn't make sense.

15. Add an immersive reading mode toggled by tapping anywhere on screen that doesn't trigger the pop-up reader. It would hide the bottom and top bars and icons (including the show/hide tab bar icon), leaving only the page number (if turned on). (Yes, if there was an always on tab/bar + slider it would leave a lot of space at the bottom, but in my case I wouldn't have that on for the kind of documents I'd want to read immersively.) If the document is an ebook with chapter info, the chapter name could move to the top where the top menu used to be. (When it's at the bottom after the page count, there's not space to display much of the name anyway on my phone.) Reader pop-ups and their menus would still show normally when a character is selected. Optionally, it would also hide the system clock and battery/connectivity.

I naturally want to be able to toggle an immersive mode like this every time I open a book in Pleco. Add an immersive mode and you're just a few steps away from a standalone epub reader app if you want to expand your company ;)
 
Bugs should be fixed in the next beta.

1) That's kind of intentional because we need it to still be visible when it's over the text. The intent in general of all of these tab bar toggles is that they're a temporary thing, not something you leave visible all the time - if you want it visible all the time you can get that by turning off 'paginate.'

2) Sorry, so you're specifically finding that you want different settings for plaintext files than for those? What settings are you finding you want to keep different?

3) Sorry, by 'auto save/load' you mean that you would like to sync changes to/from the document profile?

4) I mean maybe at some point but this is obviously very very specialized so I'd need to see a bit more widespread interest :-)

5) A bit less specialized but same basic problem.

6) That one should be doable but we need to work out which icons to support (remembering this also has to work on Android) and sync them.

7) Already supported, Settings / System & External.

8) We've experimented with this and it tends to be very fiddly and to wreck muscle memory so I'm not a fan.

9) That one should have already been supported, will check.

10) We actually had that briefly and dropped it because we were worried it was too easy to hit by mistake, I guess we could double-confirm in those cases.

11) That one might be doable as an extension of the option to keep the tab bar visible with pagination off, but we have to get through the various and sundry horrors of iPhone Duo support first.

12) Maybe something we can add for people who select 'expanded w/examples' though in general we don't love anything that makes the reader bubble text more complicated as it's going against our original design intent with the reader (look up a word as quickly as possible so you're not taken out of the flow of your reading). When would this come into play with the dictionary list (which never shows examples)?

13) This is just for cleanup / maintenance purposes?

14) Possible, but it does kind of mix up the UI metaphor so again I'd like to see some more feedback.

15) Yeah, that's another sort of philosophical thing - I know we've made a pretty great e-book reader app and that people are increasingly looking to use it for e-books in which they would only consult the reader popup sporadically and therefore have something to gain from an immersive experience the rest of the time, I just haven't settled my mind around optimizing for that yet; there's a little part of my brain that's always reminding me that this is at the end still a Chinese dictionary app :-)
 
Thanks for the reply!

1. Makes sense that the hidden tab bar wouldn’t normally be kept open.

2. I currently have a document profile I use for epubs, so this would just make it automatic for new epubs. But not a big deal to manually select that profile when I open a new epub. I’m not sure how many other people would do a similar thing anyway.

3. So it would mean that when you select a document profile, it automatically activates the “load” function and overrides the document settings with those from the profile. And then when you make any changes to the document settings, it automatically saves them to the currently selected profile. This is how I use document profiles already, I just do this manually. It would obviously need to be an opt-in feature.

4. Sure

7. Oh sweet, I hadn’t seen that, and the preloaded options there already include everything I would have added. One thing: the name field there seems kind of superfluous/misleading because it only applies to that list in Settings. Or at least superfluous/misleading for the built-in ones that have names by default and don’t have an editable “Action text” field. Also note there’s a small typo in that list: Encycopedias.

8. Alright

9. Oh that would be great. It’s not working for me currently.

10. Double confirm would make sense. It’s not a huge deal, just means I have to go through file manager from time to time and clean out old stuff.

11. Okay. Would be great if it could be supported!

12. For me it'd be for Chinese–Chinese dictionaries rather than examples. For me, Chinese text always looks smaller than English text of the same font size, but maybe that’s just because my character recognition skills are not good enough yet.

13. It would be for browsing documents, but not a big thing. This feature request list is just like my dream list. I have no idea how long it would take to implement each of these or, e.g. with (7) and (9), which are supposed to already be working.

15. Gotcha. It’s mostly just a side-effect of liquid glass because those buttons are more prominent than before, but again it's a very minor thing because I forget about it very quickly after I start reading.
 
2) So just to be clear, you have a default profile for text files which you use for text files and then a different one that you manually apply to EPUBs? But those are two different profiles? How do they differ?

3) Oh, so this is really just about saving the load/save button taps?

7) Thanks. So the custom names aren't replacing the default ones? The intent is that they would so we'll fix that.

12) Understood.
 
2) The difference is that I like to style my epubs differently from txt files (in terms of font, line spacing and margins, background color, etc.). Its aesthetic. I use text files for short, temporary stuff and epubs for books. But like I said, that might be pretty idiosyncratic to how I use Pleco, so I wouldn't say it's worth the time implementing a change without hearing from a lot of other users.

3) Yes, and especially remembering to save, because I sometimes forget.

7) So in Settings, when you customize look-ups, the ones that you've added have a "Name" field but not a "Action text" field. Custom ones have both. In both cases, changing the "Name" field just sets the name of the lookup in the Settings list of lookups. For custom lookups, the "Action text" field determines the name of the lookup in the menu in Reader. Because the built-in ones don't have an "Action text" field, the name of the lookup in Reader can't be changed. To me, it's fine that the "Action text" can't be changed for built-ins. What's strange is that built-ins have a "Name" field at all. I'm not sure why anyone would want to change the name of the built-in lookup in the Settings list. (For custom lookups, it makes sense because they don't have a name until you give them one.)
 
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