The handwriting interface does an annoying thing

[dightonjw]

See the video. When I try to use hand recognition, it pops open the mini panel, but as soon as I enter a single stroke, it closes and opens the larger panel.

If this is intended behavior, please instruct me on correct usage. If it is a bug, please fix it.

my opinion is that I should be able to enter a whole character in the small panel.

 

[mikelove]

The intent is that that smaller panel won't actually appear at all - did you select the option to make the keyboard 'floating'? That shouldn't be available, so we'll investigate why it is. (we aren't averse to floating keyboards per se, but supporting them is not an immediate priority)

 

[dightonjw]

I didn’t change any options at all actually. Is there some way that I can dump the current configuration to provide to you? I actually don’t like the floating keyboard anyway so if it can go away, that would be great. I do like the full-size keyboard, the only complaint is that in split screen mode it takes up a huge chunk of the screen, so if I’ve got YouTube or something on the left side, the whole bottom side side is taken up by the handwriting input.

 

[dightonjw]

Looks like if I collapse the English keyboard, it automatically collapses the Chinese handwriting input. I don’t know if that’s a feature of Pleco, or provided by iOS. Either way, see the above video.

 

[mikelove]

Hmm... maybe if you drag it down to the bottom of the screen by that handle at the bottom, it'll stay docked?

 

[mikelove]

Could you email a backup of your current Pleco settings? (bottom of the Settings screen under Data & Backups / Backup settings) We can't seem to reproduce this keyboard changing problem here.

 

[dightonjw]

Could you email a backup of your current Pleco settings? (bottom of the Settings screen under Data & Backups / Backup settings) We can't seem to reproduce this keyboard changing problem here.

see attachment.

 

[mikelove]

From what we can tell so far, it appears to be something iOS is doing whenever it detects that you're using an Apple Pencil for certain kinds of input - if you do that in a floating keyboard (radical too) it immediately switches it out of floating mode until you finish using the Pencil, at which point it switches back.

But if you dock the keyboard to the bottom, it should hopefully stay there - the bug doesn't seem to apply the other way, once it's manually set to be on the bottom of the screen it stays there, it only goes back and forth when you're switching between Pencil and not.

 

[mikelove]

We dug into this more and it seems to relate to the Scribble feature - the floating keyboard can come up even if you don't request it if you're using a Pencil. Anyway we'll see about suppressing that feature altogether in the next update.

 

[mikelove]

After some more investigation: turning off Scribble entirely doesn't get rid of the floating palette, but does get rid of the switching. The switching seems to be entirely initiated by the OS, it's not the result of anything we're doing - you can literally tap on the button to switch between modes in the radical input screen and it'll do the same thing.

However, it also seems like if you simply drag that palette to the bottom with the Pencil, it'll stay there until you drag it out again - we have not been able to get it to appear automatically once it's docked.