Pleco 2.0 Instruction Manual : New Feature Guide

Pleco 2.0 New Feature Guide

This guide lists many of the new features and major design changes in Pleco 2.0, and quick instructions for how to access them. Where possible, we also provide instructions on how to reconfigure 2.0 to behave more like the previous version of Pleco.

Many of the instructions below reference Pleco 2.0's Preferences screen. To get to that screen on Windows Mobile, tap on the "Dict" menu at the bottom of the screen and select "Preferences" from the menu that pops up. On Palm OS, tap on the menu button (rightmost button in the toolbar at the top of the screen) and select "Preferences" from the "Dict" menu. You can jump between sections using the popup menu at the bottom right corner of the screen.

Dictionary Browsing

New Features

• Audio. Pleco 2.0 now supports audio pronunciation for Chinese words. We’ve recorded samples of about 34,000 words in total, so you can hear an accurate native-speaker pronunciation not only for single syllables but for lots of multi-syllable words as well.
  
  To play audio for the current headword, simply tap on the speaker button in the toolbar (fifth button from the left on Palm, sixth from the left on Windows Mobile). If no audio recording is available for the current word, the software will instead play recordings for each of the individual Mandarin syllables in it. If you’d rather it not do this, check the “Skip words without multi-syllable audio” box in the "Misc" section of Preferences.
• Stroke Order / Character Info. Pleco 2.0 includes stroke order animations for about 15,000 characters, both traditional and simplified, along with an integrated character reference based on the UniHan database.
  
  To view a character's stroke order, simply tap on the character to bring up the "Character Info" screen, then select the "Stroke Order" tab to view stroke order. Tap on the play button in that screen to display the stroke order animation. The "Details" tab provides a magnified version of the character along with information on its pronunciation, meaning, and other details, and the "Components" tab lists words that begin with or contain the character.
• Popup Definitions. You can now highlight a word in a dictionary entry and pop up its definition without moving away from that dictionary entry, using the new “Pop-up Definition” command.
  
  To look up a word in a popup window, highlight the word and choose “Pop-up Definition” from the “Modules” menu, or just tap-and-hold your stylus on the highlighted text until a context menu pops up and choose “Popup Defn” from that menu.
  
• Tone coloring. We’ve now added the option to color characters in dictionary headwords based on their tone; we think this might be helpful for remembering tones correctly, since it may be easier to learn to associate a word with a particular color than with a particular tone (even if you can remember the syllable correctly).
  
  To enable tone coloring, go to the “Misc” section of Preferences and check the “Defn” and/or “List” box next to “Tone Color.”
  

• Zhuyin support. Pronunciation guides for Chinese headwords can now be displayed in Zhuyin Fuhao / BoPoMoFo instead of Pinyin; they can also be displayed with Pinyin tone numbers (1/2/3/4/5) instead of tone marks. This is also supported in example sentences in the ABC dictionary, though currently not in any other dictionary’s example sentences.
  
  To display pronunciation in Zhuyin, select "Zhuyin" in the popup menu next to "Mandarin pron" in the "Display" section of Preferences. Choose "Pinyin w/Numbers" from that same menu to use Pinyin with tone numbers.

• Hyperlinks. The ABC and Tuttle dictionaries now support hyperlinks; simply tap on an underlined word (“see also,” measure words, etc) to immediately jump to the corresponding entry.

Major Changes:

• Magnified Characters. The Palm OS version of Pleco now displays Chinese character headwords in a magnified font; this was already the case in version 1.0 on Windows Mobile.
  
  To display headwords at normal size, on Palm OS, uncheck the “Magnify characters in headword” box in the "Display" section of Preferences; on Windows Mobile, go to the "Display" section of Preferences and set the "Head size" setting to the same value as the "Defn font size" setting.
  
• Character Tapping. By default, tapping on a character will now bring up the “Character Info” screen (see below) instead of just showing you a magnified version of the character (on Palm) or doing nothing at all (on Windows Mobile).
  
  To change what happens when characters are tapped, go to the “Stylus Actions” section of Preferences. In the menu next to "Tap char action," select "Magnify Char" for magnification (the default behavior in 1.0 on Palm), or "None" for no action at all (the default in 1.0 on Windows Mobile).
  

Dictionary Searching

New Features

• Full-text search. In addition to searching for dictionary headwords, you can also search for text in the body of dictionary entries. This can be particularly useful for looking up usage examples of Chinese words, obscure words, grammatical expressions, or contextual vocabulary (for example, search for “wedding” to get some Chinese wedding toasts).
  
  To perform a full-text search, simply type a "#" character before the search query. If you'd rather use a different character, you can change this in the “Query” section of Preferences. Alternatively, choosing the "Full-Text Search" menu command will insert this character in front of a search term automatically. If you enable the “fall back on full-text search” option in the “Results” section of Preferences, Pleco will automatically perform a full-text search if it can't find any results with a regular search.
  
• English-Chinese wildcard search. Wildcards now work in English-to-Chinese searches as well as Chinese-to-English ones (which were already supported in 1.0).
  
  To perform a wildcard search, type a "@" in place of a single character (so "h@y" would match "hey" and "hay" but not "hooray"), or a "$" in place of any number of characters (including none, so "m$y" would match "my," "may," and "mulligatawny.") If you'd rather use different characters as wildcards, you can change the wildcard characters in the “Query” section of Preferences.
  
• Dictionary reordering. You can now customize the order in which dictionaries appear in search results, and also disable some dictionaries from searches altogether.
  
  To customize dictionary order, choose the "Manage Dicts" menu command (located right below Preferences), then select a dictionary from the list at the left of the screen and tap Up or Down to reorder it. Select a dictionary and uncheck the "Include in Searches" box to prevent Pleco from searching it, or uncheck the "Use in reader" box to prevent it from coming up in popup and document reader definitions.
  
  Additionally, if you enable the “Always search dicts in order” option in the "Results" section of Preferences, the first dictionary in that order will always be the first one searched, even if you’re currently viewing another dictionary.

Major Changes:

• Automatic Language Switching. Pleco will now automatically detect whether a search query is in English or Chinese, even with toneless Pinyin inputs. It first checks to see if there’s a match in the current language, and if it can't find one, it checks the other language to see if there’s a match there. If it picks the wrong language, simply tap on the language switch button (leftmost icon in the toolbar) to switch to the correct one.
  
  To disable automatic language switching, uncheck the “Auto-detect search language” checkbox in the "Query" section of Preferences.
  
• Results sorting. By default, Pleco 2.0 sorts Chinese-language search results by length, so with a two-character or two-syllable query you’d see all of the two-character/syllable results before any of the three-character/syllable ones.
  
  To keep search results in the original dictionary order, select “Dict Position” next to “Sort results by” in the "Results" section of Preferences, or select “None” to have it return results in search index order (the default behavior in 1.0).
  
• Pinyin Search. We’ve made a small-but-important change to the way Pinyin searches without tone numbers are processed. Before, the software would simply find the longest Pinyin match it could, so a search like “changan” would be processed as “chang an” but a search like “keneng” would be processed as “ken eng”. We now follow the standard Pinyin rule of requiring apostrophes (or spaces, or tone numbers) before syllables that begin with vowels, so “changan” would be processed as “chan gan” but “keneng” would be processed as “ke neng” – to get “chang an” you’d want to enter “chang an” or “chang’an” or “chang2an”.

Text Input

New Features

• Automatic handwriting result input. After you finish writing a character, Pleco can automatically enter the best match without requiring you to select it from the list of results. If it enters the wrong character, you can tap on another character in the result list to replace the character it entered with that character.
  
  To enable automatic handwriting result input, go to the "Input" section of Preferences and enable the "Auto-enter best HWR match" checkbox. If you'd like to have Pleco automatically recognize a character without requiring you to tap on the Recognize button, choose a delay time from the menu next to "HWR auto-rec after" - Pleco will automatically recognize the character you entered after the pen has been lifted from the screen for that much time.
• Zhuyin Input. Along with Zhuyin text display, Pleco now allows you to enter search queries using Zhuyin Fuhao / BoPoMoFo instead of Pinyin.
  
  To enter text in Zhuyin, select the "Keyboard" tab in the Input screen (see below), then choose "Zhuyin" from the menu at the bottom left corner of that screen. You can do this even if the dictionary is set to display pronunciations in Pinyin.
  
• Simplified / Traditional handwriting switch. In the handwriting input dialog box, there are now separate checkboxes to enable support for simplified, traditional, and rare characters. If you’re confident that you’ll only be inputting simplified characters, you can uncheck the "Traditional" box to improve accuracy by only looking for simplified-character matches; if you're a beginning student, unchecking the "Rare" box will limit results only to frequently-used characters, further improving accuracy.
  

Major Changes:

• Revamped Input Screen. The old Handwriting and Radical screens have been combined together into a single Input screen (“ru” character toolbar button), which brings you to a dialog box that lets you tab between handwriting, radical, and an onscreen keyboard input without exiting / reopening. It also lets you enter more than one character at a time without returning to the main screen – you enter as many characters as you want (character/Pinyin mixes are allowed as in 1.0) and then tap on the Done button to return to the main screen.
  
  To return to 1.0-style one-character-at-a-time input, go to the "Input" section of Preferences and check the “1.0-style input screens” box. You can use the "Toolbar" section of Preferences to set up separate handwriting / radical buttons if you prefer those to the single Input button.
• Revamped Input Palette. The text input palette embedded in the main dictionary screen has also been updated. It includes a keyboard option as well, and you toggle between palette handwriting recognition (where you draw characters in a small box), fullscreen handwriting recognition (where you can draw characters anywhere in the definition area), radical and keyboard input by tapping on a single button ("bi" or "bu" character or a keyboard icon) - you can tap-hold on that button to jump between modes directly. It's also resizeable - drag the resizer bar to make it larger or smaller.
  
  To enable the input palette, go to the "Layout" section of "Preferences" and choose where you want it to be located in the menu next to "Input palette location." Tapping-and-holding on the Input toolbar button will also work (as it did in 1.0).

Instant Access

Instant Access is a surprisingly little-used feature in Pleco which lets you look up Chinese words in other applications on your handheld/smartphone, like web pages and text messages.

• Windows Mobile support. Instant Access is now available on Windows Mobile in addition to Palm OS.
  
  To enable Instant Access on Windows Mobile, install the “Instant Access Launcher” utility (“PlecoLaunch”) along with the rest of Pleco 2.0, and then assign it to a hardware button by going to Start / Settings / Buttons. Once you’ve done that, all you have to do is highlight a word and press that button to pop up a Pleco definition window for that word. We've tested this to work in Internet Explorer, Messaging, and PocketWord, though it should work in many other applications as well. If you don't have a free hardware button to assign it to, run PlecoLaunch once and that should add it to the Start Menu; you can then select it from there to bring up Instant Access.
  
• Enhanced Palm OS version. Instant Access remains available on Palm OS as well, and has now been upgraded with audio and rich-text support along with the ability to simultaneously display simplified and traditional characters (it no longer relies on CJKOS to render Chinese text).
  
  To enable Instant Access on Palm OS, go to the "External" section of Preferences, check the box next to "from button press", then tap on the dotted-outlined box to the right of it and press one of your handheld's hardware buttons to assign it to Pleco. On Palm handhelds without keyboards, you can also access Instant Access from the command bar; simply draw a diagonal line (bottom left to top right) in the Graffiti handwriting area at the bottom of your Palm's screen, then tap on the Pleco icon in the command bar that appears at the bottom of the screen. If you find that Instant Access isn't working correctly in some applications, set the "Text extraction mode" in the External preferences screen to "Experimental."
  
• Automatic clipboard lookup. Both the Palm OS and Windows Mobile versions also now support the ability to automatically look up text in the clipboard when the software is opened; this too can be enabled from the “External” section of Preferences. You can also configure Pleco to look up clipboard text longer than a specified length in Pleco’s built-in document reader (see below), so if you want to decode an entire e-mail / text message / web page from within Pleco you can simply copy it to the clipboard, launch Pleco and have it come right up in the document reader.
  
  To enable automatic clipboard lookup, check the "Search for clipboard text on open" box in the "External" section of Preferences. Select a number from the "Use reader if larger than" box to select a number of characters above which Pleco should look up the clipboard text in the document reader instead of searching for a single matching dictionary entry.
  

Interface Customizations

• Screen-orientation-dependent toolbars / layout. Pleco’s toolbar button commands and interface layout can now be set to change automatically depending on whether your handheld’s screen is oriented in portrait (tall) or landscape (wide) mode. This is particularly useful on sliding-keyboard devices like the HTC TyTN II / Touch Pro, where the screen automatically rotates when you open the keyboard slider.
  
  To set the layout to change when the screen orientation changes, check the "Change layout in landscape mode" box in the "Layout" section of Preferences. Check the "Change btns in landscape mode" box in the "Toolbar" section of Preferences to configure the toolbar to change.
  
• Customizable stylus / button commands. Pleco can now be configured to automatically execute certain commands when text is tapped / highlighted, so if for example you do a lot of cross-referencing, you can configure Pleco to copy a word to the Input Field whenever you highlight and then tap on it. Hardware buttons can also now be assigned to commands in the main dictionary, so that for example pressing the center navigation button would toggle between dictionaries or clear the contents of the Input Field.
  
  To customize stylus commands, go to the "Stylus Actions" section of Preferences and choose the appropriate command next to the action you wish to assign it to. Button commands can be customized through the "Button Actions" section of Preferences.

Ordering / Unlocking

• Hardware-based licensing on Palm. Pleco 2.0 on Palm OS is now locked to your device’s hardware serial number rather than its HotSync Username, as is already the case on Windows Mobile, so you’ll no longer need a new keyfile if your system is reset. If you get a new Palm, you can automatically obtain a new keyfile for that using the My Orders page on our website without having to buy the software again.
  
  We know this change may upset some people, but after studying tech support e-mails we’ve concluded that having to get a new keyfile when you replace your handheld is considerably less annoying than having to get one if your username is reset (particularly when traveling, since it may not be possible to HotSync your Palm / restore its username in those cases), and thanks to the new SD card locking option (see below), users who swap handhelds frequently won’t need to constantly be requesting new keyfiles.
• SD Card Locking. It’s now possible to lock your copy of Pleco to a particular SD flash memory card instead of a particular handheld; this is especially useful for customers with more than one handheld (say a large-screen handheld and a small-screen smartphone), as you’ll no longer need to buy a separate copy of Pleco for each of them. This is cross-platform, so you can lock a copy of Pleco to an SD card and use it on both Palm and Windows Mobile.
  
  To lock Pleco to an SD Card, tap on the “Card ID” button in Pleco’s “Ordering” screen and enter that instead of your System ID when ordering / activating Pleco 2.0; the resulting keyfile will unlock Pleco on any system with that SD card inserted. The software will only work when the card is present, and will exit if the card is removed. If you have one device with a full-sized SD card slot and another that only takes the smaller microSD cards, the Card ID will remain the same if a microSD card is inserted into a micro-to-full-size SD card adapter, so you can lock the software to a microSD card and have it work on both systems.
  
• Remember unused unlock keys. Unlock keys for dictionaries that aren’t currently installed will no longer be discarded, so if you forget to install a dictionary you won’t have to go to the trouble of unlocking Pleco again after you install it.
  
• Improved ABC demo version. The demo version of the ABC dictionary now includes headwords and Pinyin for all entries (not just the ‘a’ and ‘b’ ones), and definitions for all 'a,' 'b,' and 'c' entries, making the demo version a bit less useless than it was in 1.0.

User Dictionaries

• English-to-Chinese. User dictionary entries can now be created with English-to-Chinese as well as Chinese-to-English headwords, and Chinese-to-English entries can include separate simplified / traditional character headwords.
  
• Sort order. User dictionary entries are now sorted like regular dictionary entries, rather than coming up in the order they were created as in 1.0.
  
• Create when needed. User dictionaries are not created until you actually add entries to them, so you’ll no longer see an unwanted “USR” item in your dictionary list (or have to wait for an unused user dictionary database file to load).
  
• Improved database. User dictionaries are now stored as SQLite databases, which should make them considerably more reliable and less prone to file corruption than they were in 1.0.
  
• Undo imports. User dictionary entries created through flashcard imports can now be quickly deleted using the “Undo” command (accessed through the Manage Dictionaries screen).
• Multiple-character input. User dictionary fields can be edited using the new Input screen, so you can enter multiple characters at a time without having to keep going back into the handwriting input dialog.

Flashcards

The flashcard system is the single biggest area of improvement in Pleco 2.0; we’ve almost completely reinvented it since 1.0. See the “Getting Acquainted with the 2.0 Flashcard System” article for more details, but here's a brief summary of some of the more important new features:

• New test modes. You can now give yourself a multiple-choice test, an audio listening test, a test on stroke order (requiring you to tap on a character’s strokes in the correct order), or a fill-in-the-blanks test where you’re prompted to write in the characters or type in the Pinyin for a particular card. There’s also a Pinyin Tone Tester mode where you’ll be given a headword / pinyin and asked only to supply the correct tones.
  
• Multiple profiles / scorefiles. You can now save a set of flashcard settings in a “Profile,” allowing you to easily return to those settings again without having to go through and manually reconfigure them. Profiles can optionally track card scoring / study history information independently of each other, so if for example you want one profile where cards come up more often based on how well you’ve learned their Pinyin and another where they come up more often based on how well you’ve learned their stroke order, you can do that using “scorefiles.”
  
• New scoring system. Our old system of “Ranks” has been replaced by a new one using “Scores.” The biggest advantage of this is that card frequencies / repetition intervals can now change not only based on whether you answered the card correctly or incorrectly but also based on how well you’ve remembered the card in the past (as in the popular programs SuperMemo and Mnemosyne); you can also rate how well you remembered the card and have that factored into the next repetition interval.
  
• Multiple categories for each card. A single card can now belong to multiple flashcard lists (renamed “Categories” in 2.0), allowing you to avoid keeping duplicate copies of the same card in multiple lists.
  
• Hierarchical categories. Flashcard categories can now be grouped under other categories, so you could have a single “Practical Chinese Reader” category with separate categories under it for each chapter rather than having all of those chapters appear together in the main category list.
  
• Improved database. Flashcards are now stored as SQLite databases, making them much more reliable / less likely to become corrupted and enabling a lot of powerful new features like searching for cards by their headwords.
• Improved import/export. We’ve added a new XML-based format for exporting/importing flashcards, allowing you to export the entire contents of your flashcard database (including score / review history information) rather than just a list of words. The importer also does a better job at matching words to dictionary entries, and can optionally prompt you to select the correct entry if it finds more than one potential match. There's also a screen to double-check that you've selected your text encoding correctly, and an Undo button to reverse an incorrect import.
  
• Saved sessions. It’s now possible to exit a flashcard session and resume it later; you’ll be prompted to save a session whenever you exit in the middle of one.
  
• Review incorrect cards. There’s now the option to review incorrect flashcards again at the end of a flashcard session; you can also loop through them repeatedly until you’ve answered every one of them correctly at least once.
  
• Improved Manage Flashcards screen. Instead of simply listing cards in a particular category, you can now search for cards by a wide variety of criteria (headword, dictionary, date created, score, # of times reviewed, last answered correctly). You can also change card scores / category assignments and even remap them to a different dictionary as a batch operation (instead of doing it one-card-at-a-time).
  
• Improved session algorithms. Frequency-adjusted sessions now behave much more intelligently (no more cards coming up twice in a row), sessions can now handle an unlimited number of cards (no more error message about having too many), missing / blank cards will now be automatically skipped, and cards that have their scores change during a session so that they no longer fall within the session parameters won’t reappear again in that session.

Document Reader

• A brand new feature, Pleco’s built-in document reader allows you to easily read Chinese-language documents by simply tapping on words to look up their meanings. This works with text files, PalmDoc files on Palm OS, and with text pasted in from the clipboard, along with Pleco-supplied document files (dictionary appendices and such). It works with Unicode, GB, and Big5 text encodings, supports a basic bookmarking feature, and can be navigated entirely using hardware buttons if desired. (we have a lot more features planned for future versions, of course)
  
  To access the document reader, simply choose the “Open Reader” command from the Modules menu, select your document type / document file / text encoding, and tap Start to begin.
• We’ve also added the ability to dump dictionary entries to the document reader, particularly useful with entries in the new Chinese-to-Chinese Xiandai Hanyu Guifan Cidian.
  
  To view a dictionary entry in the document reader, choose the “Send Entry to Reader” command in the Modules menu.

Miscellaneous

• Preferences Reset. Pleco's preferences can now easily be restored to their default settings. You can also delete all recent search data (we're not sure why this is such a heavily requested feature, but it is), and delete your unlock data (restoring Pleco to a demo version).
  
  To reset Pleco's preferences, tap on the "Reset al prefs to defaults" button in the "Misc" section of Preferences. Tap the "Clear all recent search data" button to delete all recent searches. To delete all unlock data, go to the "Ordering" screen and tap on the "To Demo" button.
  

Technical Improvements - Windows Mobile

• More compatible font rendering. Pleco 2.0 on Windows Mobile uses an open-source font rendering system called FreeType to draw text, instead of using Microsoft’s built-in system as it did in 1.0. The big advantage of this is that Pleco’s fonts should no longer interfere with text display anywhere else on your system, so you’ll no longer see empty boxes or oddly-rendered characters when Pleco is running in the background. It also means that font files can now be stored on flash memory cards, considerably reducing Pleco’s internal memory usage, and should allow those fonts to be loaded more reliably as well (so no more opening up Pleco to find Chinese characters are missing).
  
• Faster definition rendering. Pleco 2.0 also uses a new custom user interface control to draw dictionary definition text, and because of this there should no longer be a long delay between tapping on an entry in a search result and having it appear in the definition area.
  
• Non-destructive clipboard search. Pleco 2.0 now saves the contents of the system clipboard before attempting to look up text in it, so your clipboard should no longer be erased when launching Pleco.
  
• Improved database search. Pleco 2.0 now checks for new dictionary databases whenever it’s activated, so you should no longer need to quit / reopen it in order to get newly-installed databases to appear. (you can disable that search in the External section of Preferences for slightly faster startups) It also searches deeper into directories, so you're less likely to run into problems with Pleco not finding its data files.
  
• Improved installer. The new automated installer system on Windows Mobile now includes the option to install your keyfile for you (so no more fiddling around with My Computer), and should be considerably more reliable and faster than the old system, as it now transfers files directly to your handheld’s flash memory card (rather than copying them to internal memory and then running an additional installer to put them on the card).
  
• Code signing. The Pleco 2.0 application / handwriting recognizer binaries are now code-signed, so you should no longer see any security warnings the first time you run Pleco (and should no longer see the software refuse to launch at all on some smartphones).
  
• My Documents folder sync. Flashcard / user dictionary database files now support read sharing, which means if you’ve set up your My Documents folder to automatically synchronize with your desktop, those files should be backed up along with everything else (rather than putting up error messages as in 1.0).
• Menu bar. We now use a standard softkey menu bar on Windows Mobile 5/6 devices, so if your phone/handheld has hardware menu buttons you can now bring up Pleco’s menu bar with those rather than having to tap on the screen.
  
• Fullscreen Flashcards. Flashcard sessions are now full-screen, hiding the top / bottom menubars to reduce distractions and give you additional screen space. The new document reader also employs this fullscreen mode.
  
  To restore menu bars in flashcard sessions, go to the "External" panel in Preferences and enable the "Don't hide menu bars in flash / reader" option.

Technical Improvements - Palm OS

• SD Card flashcard / user dictionary database storage. Flashcard and user dictionary database files can now be moved to an SD card to save internal memory storage space (at the expense of some performance).
  
  To store flashcard / user dictionary databases on a card, use our PlecoMover utility to copy them there.
• ARM acceleration. Pleco 2.0 on Palm now uses ARM-accelerated code for many critical functions, including font rendering, dictionary search / database access, and flashcards. This may result in better performance in some areas, though the extra processing time needed for new features (particularly in flashcards) may offset some of those performance gains.
  
• Handwriting recognizer from card. Pleco 2.0 on Palm automatically checks to see if the handwriting recognizer database file is installed on an SD card instead of in internal memory, and offers to copy it to internal memory for you if that’s the case.
  
• Menu button in toolbar. The toolbar on Palm OS now includes a Menu button by default (rightmost button in the toolbar), allowing easy access to the system menu bar; this is particularly useful for new users who may not know how to access the menu bar otherwise.
  
• Flashcard hardware buttons. Hardware button control has been improved in flashcard sessions, so your Palm should no longer refuse to power off in the middle of a flashcard session.

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