writing Hanzi in Plecodict

[nb]

I am a bit perturbed that my new Pleco software is not running correctly on my tungsten E2 palm pilot. In particular, when I write the hanzi into the recogition field, tangential lines shoot off of the point where I press down my syli pen. Any suggestions on how to rectify the problem? Do I need to reinstall the software?

cheers,

nb

 

[mikelove]

This is mostly a Palm OS problem, actually, or at least we haven't been able to find anything in PlecoDict that could possibly cause it; we record whatever points the OS gives us, basically, so if extra lines are showing it up it's because the OS is telling us that the stylus was moved there.

Does this happen every time you draw a character or just occasionally? For occasional problems, the best workaround would be to use the Undo button to get rid of the problem stroke. If it happens too often to simply work around, you might want to call Palm tech support. You could also try hard resetting your Palm (hold down the power button while sticking a paperclip in the reset hole, wiping its memory) and reinstalling PlecoDict after that.

 

[koreth]

For what it's worth, I see the same behavior on my Treo 650, but only in PlecoDict -- I have a little sketchpad app called DrawIt and it never exhibits the same problem.

However, it also doesn't seem to sample as frequently as PlecoDict -- I have to draw more slowly in DrawIt to get a curve as smooth as I can get in PlecoDict when I draw at a natural speed. I wonder if they're taking several samples for each movement of the cursor to work around this bug.

 

[mikelove]

Could be; the "smooth HWR input lines" option on PlecoDict might help dampen the effect a bit, since it does pretty much the same thing, though since it factors in every point you'd likely still see a large bump / spike in the line you were drawing.

What we'd really want to do is add some sort of a filter to ignore any point that was more than a couple of pixels away from the previous one; the tricky thing about that would be finding the right value, you don't want people to run into problems if they're drawing very quickly on a very slow Palm.