User Dictionary

[ACardiganAndAFrown]

I'm making my own dictionary with a lot of nonstandard pinyin...
i.e.: one of the words the pinyin should be: ba4 juo2 ho4
but, pleco, automatically, changes it to: ba4 ju5o2 hong4
I'm assuming there is a list of what is a pinyin "word" and juo doesnt fit it but ju does...where hong comes from I really don't know
but is there a away to fix it + other nonstandard pinyin problems?

another example:
ba3 be2r
becomes: ba3 bei2r

--edit--:

also, is there anyway to add images into the pleco through the user dictionary?
I have a character that seems to 打不出来 but i have an image file of the character that could be used...

 

[mikelove]

I'm making my own dictionary with a lot of nonstandard pinyin...
i.e.: one of the words the pinyin should be: ba4 juo2 ho4
but, pleco, automatically, changes it to: ba4 ju5o2 hong4
I'm assuming there is a list of what is a pinyin "word" and juo doesnt fit it but ju does...where hong comes from I really don't know
but is there a away to fix it + other nonstandard pinyin problems?

Yes - just put a @ at the start of the string and Pleco will keep it unaltered and not try to turn it into Pinyin. (note that this will make that entry unusable both in fill-in-the-blanks pronunciation flashcard tests and in Pinyin searches)

also, is there anyway to add images into the pleco through the user dictionary?
I have a character that seems to 打不出来 but i have an image file of the character that could be used...

Not at the moment, but it's in the works for a future release. We had only been planning to use this for tacking additional images onto definitions, though, and not for adding custom characters to dictionary headwords... which character is this?

 

[ACardiganAndAFrown]

I'm making my own dictionary with a lot of nonstandard pinyin...
i.e.: one of the words the pinyin should be: ba4 juo2 ho4
but, pleco, automatically, changes it to: ba4 ju5o2 hong4
I'm assuming there is a list of what is a pinyin "word" and juo doesnt fit it but ju does...where hong comes from I really don't know
but is there a away to fix it + other nonstandard pinyin problems?

Yes - just put a @ at the start of the string and Pleco will keep it unaltered and not try to turn it into Pinyin. (note that this will make that entry unusable both in fill-in-the-blanks pronunciation flashcard tests and in Pinyin searches)

There's no way to maintain the pinyin search?
Or even if you search once in the dictionary it's still unfindable?

also, is there anyway to add images into the pleco through the user dictionary?
I have a character that seems to 打不出来 but i have an image file of the character that could be used...

Not at the moment, but it's in the works for a future release. We had only been planning to use this for tacking additional images onto definitions, though, and not for adding custom characters to dictionary headwords... which character is this?

拼音a4,ba4
㈠夹层的衣服.㈡[~单]<川方言>床单
There isn't any "character" (on a computer) that exists for this...just images...

 

[mikelove]

There's no way to maintain the pinyin search?
Or even if you search once in the dictionary it's still unfindable?

Not without completely overhauling the way we do Pinyin searches, and honestly there just isn't enough demand for this to justify doing that.

拼音a4,ba4
㈠夹层的衣服.㈡[~单]<川方言>床单
There isn't any "character" (on a computer) that exists for this...just images...

Yeah, that one doesn't seem to be in even the very obscure corners of the Unicode text encoding standard. Which means it's probably not in any major dictionary like 汉语大字典 either (since Unicode collects characters from those) - is this a recently-invented character?

 

[ACardiganAndAFrown]

There's no way to maintain the pinyin search?
Or even if you search once in the dictionary it's still unfindable?

Not without completely overhauling the way we do Pinyin searches, and honestly there just isn't enough demand for this to justify doing that.

拼音a4,ba4
㈠夹层的衣服.㈡[~单]<川方言>床单
There isn't any "character" (on a computer) that exists for this...just images...

Yeah, that one doesn't seem to be in even the very obscure corners of the Unicode text encoding standard. Which means it's probably not in any major dictionary like 汉语大字典 either (since Unicode collects characters from those) - is this a recently-invented character?

Well here's the deal, this should clear things up a bit, I'm in the process of (trying) to make a digital copy of 成都话方言词典. Firstly the 拼音 in the book is 四川话拼音 and not standard mandarin 拼音, so a character like 脚, which in mandarin would be jiǎo, in 四川话, or at least in my dictionary, is written juó. So here's the 纠结 - how to maintain the accuracy of the original text + language whilst being searchable. Here's a picture of the dictionary entry:

This dictionary that I'm attempting to digitize was printed in 1987 this is the entry containing the

that I was trying to put into my 'user dictionary':

It can't be a recently invented character seeing as this dictionary was printed more than 20 years ago, but still doesn't seem to be that relevant...
The lovely folks over at zdic.net were able to help me find this page:
http://zisea.com/content.asp?word=186161
which says

《中华字海》页:1142 号:27

so although it may not be in the 汉语大字典 it's at least in 中华字海...

 

[mikelove]

Well here's the deal, this should clear things up a bit, I'm in the process of (trying) to make a digital copy of 成都话方言词典. Firstly the 拼音 in the book is 四川话拼音 and not standard mandarin 拼音, so a character like 脚, which in mandarin would be jiǎo, in 四川话, or at least in my dictionary, is written juó.

Interesting... was wondering if those were just some obscure Pinyin syllables I hadn't heard of yet. This might be potentially supportable along with Cantonese, actually - the same mechanism that will let us support two sets of basic sounds could be pretty easily expanded to 3 or 4 or 17 or however many other Chinese dialects people want. Would be tricky to make that user-defineable, though - it's baked into our app at a pretty low level - so we'd need to find tables for other dialects we wanted to support. Unless this is actually just differently-pronounced Mandarin (with a 1-to-1 syllable mapping), in which case we could just support it as an alternate Mandarin system like we do with Zhuyin now.

 

[ACardiganAndAFrown]

Well here's the deal, this should clear things up a bit, I'm in the process of (trying) to make a digital copy of 成都话方言词典. Firstly the 拼音 in the book is 四川话拼音 and not standard mandarin 拼音, so a character like 脚, which in mandarin would be jiǎo, in 四川话, or at least in my dictionary, is written juó.

Interesting... was wondering if those were just some obscure Pinyin syllables I hadn't heard of yet. This might be potentially supportable along with Cantonese, actually - the same mechanism that will let us support two sets of basic sounds could be pretty easily expanded to 3 or 4 or 17 or however many other Chinese dialects people want. Would be tricky to make that user-defineable, though - it's baked into our app at a pretty low level - so we'd need to find tables for other dialects we wanted to support. Unless this is actually just differently-pronounced Mandarin (with a 1-to-1 syllable mapping), in which case we could just support it as an alternate Mandarin system like we do with Zhuyin now.

Well actually, I've kind of found a sort of 'work-around' for this problem. Like before I mentioned the 罢脚货 example (like you can see in the picture I posted earlier) so the way to fix this - with the system that is in place right now - is just to add neutral tone markers inbetween the pinyin that pleco does/doesn't recognize...thus writing: ba4 ju5o2 h5o4 lets pleco write it out as: bà ju'ó h'ò. Even though it is separated, somewhat, with the apostrophes - it doesn't look horrible, or misleading for that fact, and it also retains the seachability.

For example too i mentioned before be2r - using this 'workaround' you could just simply write it out as b5e2r resulting in: b'ér. Which is not all that bad.

--Another question that I do have though is, I guess, concerning fonts.



As you can see in the above picture I have an entry for this word Bai Zi that appears as a headword with no problems at all. As part of the definition though, the entry again uses this Bai character but instead of rendering the actual character it is rendered a box. I don't really know what causes this - but what && why is it possible to be displayed in the headword but not in the definition? It's quite frustrating..

 

[mikelove]

As you can see in the above picture I have an entry for this word Bai Zi that appears as a headword with no problems at all. As part of the definition though, the entry again uses this Bai character but instead of rendering the actual character it is rendered a box. I don't really know what causes this - but what && why is it possible to be displayed in the headword but not in the definition? It's quite frustrating..

That's because it's a Unicode Extension B character, and we haven't gotten around to adding support for them everywhere in our software yet; we only started supporting them in the document reader a few months ago, and in non-user dictionary entries only a few months before that. They're really tricky to deal with technically (require all sorts of major code changes) and there isn't actually that much demand for them since they generally only crop up in very specialized situations like this, so it's tough to make them a high priority. Very few other apps (even Chinese dictionaries) bother to support them all, and I don't think iOS knows how to render most of them, so relative to everybody else we actually do a pretty good job with this

 

[ACardiganAndAFrown]

As you can see in the above picture I have an entry for this word Bai Zi that appears as a headword with no problems at all. As part of the definition though, the entry again uses this Bai character but instead of rendering the actual character it is rendered a box. I don't really know what causes this - but what && why is it possible to be displayed in the headword but not in the definition? It's quite frustrating..

That's because it's a Unicode Extension B character, and we haven't gotten around to adding support for them everywhere in our software yet; we only started supporting them in the document reader a few months ago, and in non-user dictionary entries only a few months before that. They're really tricky to deal with technically (require all sorts of major code changes) and there isn't actually that much demand for them since they generally only crop up in very specialized situations like this, so it's tough to make them a high priority. Very few other apps (even Chinese dictionaries) bother to support them all, and I don't think iOS knows how to render most of them, so relative to everybody else we actually do a pretty good job with this

Is there no way to do this even jailbroken?
Adding new fonts, what not?

 

[mikelove]

Is there no way to do this even jailbroken?
Adding new fonts, what not?

Unfortunately no; it's not a font thing, it's an issue with our text processing code. There's a good chance this might be fixed in 2.3, though.

 

[ACardiganAndAFrown]

Is there no way to do this even jailbroken?
Adding new fonts, what not?

Unfortunately no; it's not a font thing, it's an issue with our text processing code. There's a good chance this might be fixed in 2.3, though.

For something that isn't supported anywhere else, that's awesome.

Edit: Hopefully, this is the last question, for now. Thanks for your patience.
How can links be 'coded' into the definition?
If it says abbr. for X - or also see X and then X is blue-clickable link to that entry.

 

[mikelove]

Edit: Hopefully, this is the last question, for now. Thanks for your patience.
How can links be 'coded' into the definition?
If it says abbr. for X - or also see X and then X is blue-clickable link to that entry.

This is unofficial / subject to change / probably-not-a-good-idea-to-make-heavy-use-of, but if you insert the Unicode private-use character EAB8 at the start of a range of text and EABB at the end, that will turn that text into a hyperlink. (use the "insert symbol" or "insert character" command in your favorite text editor to insert it)

Also: EAB1 is a newline, and EAB2/3 turn bold text on and off.

 

[ACardiganAndAFrown]

Are the user dictionaries reverse-searchable?
(Using the hash mark #啥子 method to search...)

also: is it possible to reverse search one character? like:
#摔
?
I've been trying, and it doesn't seem to compute.

 

[mikelove]

Are the user dictionaries reverse-searchable?
(Using the hash mark #啥子 method to search...)

Not yet, it's been on our to-do list for years but it's really complicated and we've had too many other items that are more-requested / less effort.

also: is it possible to reverse search one character? like:
#摔
?
I've been trying, and it doesn't seem to compute.

No - wouldn't be difficult to support coding-wise, but it would make our database files a lot bigger and we don't really see the point - example sentences tend to draw from a fairly narrow vocabulary, so the vast majority of characters seem to either be so common as to render results for them useless (sifting through thousands of entries) or so rare as to not show up in any entries aside from their own.