Options relating to Pleco’s handling of language variations (Cantonese, Traditional, Zhuyin) along with fonts and font sizes.
Options relating to Pleco’s display of Chinese characters.
Traditional characters - Use traditional instead of simplified characters in dictionary entries and example sentences.
Chinese font - Determines which font Pleco will use to render Chinese characters. By default we use a gorgeous, specially-customized Chinese font called XinGothic that’s built into our app, but you can also choose the built-in iOS STHeiti Chinese fonts, and several additional Chinese fonts are available in “Add-ons.”
Headword mode - Determines how Pleco displays Chinese-character headwords which have both Simplified and Traditional character variants.
One Set Only - Display headwords in the currently selected character set only.
Both Sets - Display headwords in both Traditional and Simplified characters, with the one that’s not currently selected in brackets
Both w/Dashes - Same as “Both Sets,” but characters that are the same in Simplified and Traditional are replaced by dashes (-) in the bracketed set.
Mix-size Both - Same as “Both Sets,” but the bracketed character set is displayed in a normal font size if the headword is magnified.
Mix w/Dashes - Same as “Both w/Dashes,” but the bracketed character set is displayed in a normal font size if the headword is magnified.
Bold headword chars - Display Chinese characters in dictionary headwords in boldface.
Options relating to Pleco’s display of Mandarin pronunciation guides.
Phonetic system - Determines how Pleco displays the Mandarin pronunciations of characters and words.
None - Don’t display Mandarin pronunciations at all (characters-only). May cause odd behavior in some parts of Pleco (like flashcard multi-choice tests that prompt you to select pronunciation.
Pinyin w/Marks - Display Mandarin pronunciations in Pinyin with tone marks above each syllable.
Pinyin w/Numbers - Display Mandarin pronunciations in Pinyin but with tone numbers (1/2/3/4/5) at the end of syllables instead of tone marks above them.
Zhuyin - Display Mandarin pronunciations in Zhuyin characters (also known as BoPoMoFo), with tone marks at the end of each syllable.
Show Zhuyin too - If you’ve selected one of the Pinyin modes above, this option will appear to allow you to show Zhuyin as well (on the line below the Pinyin).
Show Pinyin too - If you’ve selected the Zhuyin mode above, this option will appear to allow you to show Pinyin as well (on the line below the Zhuyin).
Hide example pronunciation - Hide all pronunciation guides for example sentences, so that you’ll see only characters and English in them even from dictionaries that include Pinyin.
Options relating to Pleco’s use of Cantonese.
Enable Search - Allows you to enter search terms in Cantonese as well as Mandarin.
Phonetic system - Determines how Pleco displays the Cantonese pronunciations of characters and words.
Jyutping w/Digits - Jyutping romanization with a regular digit after each syllable to indicate tone.
JP w/Superscripts - Jyutping romanization with a superscripted digit after each syllable to indicate tone.
Yale w/Marks - Yale romanization with flat/falling/rising marks and added ’h’es to indicate tones.
Yale w/Numbers - Yale romanization with a digit after each syllable to indicate tone.
Auto-generate if missing - Automatically generate Cantonese readings for any entries that are missing them. (this will not affect search)
Options to control the size of text in various parts of Pleco’s user interface
Entry headword - Size of magnified characters in headwords at the top of dictionary entries.
Entry body - Size of body text in dictionary entries (everything that’s not in the headword).
Popup definition - Size of all text in the popup dictionary definition “bubble.”
List Chinese headword - Size of Chinese headwords in search result / entry lists.
List English headword - Size of English headwords in search result / entry lists.
List Pinyin - Size of Pinyin/Zhuyin/Cantonese pronunciations in search result / entry lists.
List definition - Size of definitions in search result / entry lists.
Enlarge Chinese in entries - Increase the size of Chinese characters relative to other text in the DICT/SENTS definition screen tabs.
Custom color schemes for Pleco’s UI and for character tones
Customize Pleco’s user interface color scheme.
Enable Night Mode - Inverted color scheme (white text on a black background), useful at night or in a dark room or if you simply prefer that look to the default black-on-white.
Colors used when Night Mode is disabled.
Tint toolbars - Customize the color of Pleco’s toolbars instead of using the default system toolbar color.
Toolbar color - Choose the color used in those custom toolbars.
Item tint color - Tint color for items (buttons, labels, etc) in toolbars.
Text color - Color for all regular text.
Tint / Highlight color - Color for highlighted text and other highlights throughout Pleco’s interface; also determines the tint color of toolbar items if you have not enabled “Tint Toolbars.”
Label / separator color - Color for grayed-out field labels and list separators.
Background color - Background color for pretty much everything with a background.
Settings header color - Color for headers in configuration screens.
Settings background color - Color for the background of configuration screens.
Reset color schemes to defaults - Reset all color scheme preferences to their default values without resetting Pleco’s other preferences.
Use Cantonese tones - Use Cantonese (rather than Mandarin) readings as the basis for tone coloring.
Color headwords by tone - Color Chinese-character headwords in search results / definitions based on their tone.
Tint headwords (like examples) - Color Chinese headwords in Pleco’s configured tint / highlight color instead. (we think this looks cooler than regular black if you opt not to use tone colors)
Color pronunciation by tone - Color Mandarin pronunciations (in Zhuyin and Pinyin) based on their tone.
Color examples by tone - Color Chinese-character headwords in example sentences based on their tone; note that this only works in dictionaries that include Pinyin for their examples.
Color example pron by tone - Color Mandarin pronunciations in example sentences based on their tone.
Audio-related options
Options shared by both types of audio
Volume - Select the volume at which audio plays, 10 being highest. Note that Pleco’s audio playback volume is also subject to your system volume setting.
TTS Playback speed - Speed at which text is read.
Options relating to pronunciation of audio in headwords.
Preferred gender - Determines which set of recordings to use when playing Mandarin headword audio.
Female - Female speaker
Male - Male speaker
Alternating - Alternates between male and female speakers each time you play audio.
Alt (F 1st) - Alternates between male and female speakers, but always begins with a male speaker on each new dictionary entry or flashcard.
Alt (M 1st) - Alternates between male and female speakers, but always begins with a female speaker on each new dictionary entry or flashcard.
Preferred gender (Cantonese) - Determines which set of recordings to use when playing Cantonese headword audio.
Use TTS if no recording - With this option enabled, Pleco will only play audio for entries for which it has a full audio recording (i.e., one that exactly matches the word); with this option disabled, if it can’t find an exact match it will play back the word syllable-by-syllable instead. However, it’ll play them using text-to-speech instead of syllable-by-syllable if a text-to-speech system is installed.
Use Cantonese in popup/OCR - Play Cantonese instead of Mandarin audio when tapping on the audio button in the Popup Definition and OCR screens.
Female TTS Voice - Text-to-speech voice used for female Mandarin headword audio.
Male TTS Voice - Text-to-speech voice used for male Mandarin headword audio.
Options relating to audio in example sentences and reader documents.
Voice - Voice used for text-to-speech playback.
Hide example button - Hide the text-to-speech audio buttons which normally appear next to example sentences.
Enable English - Enable English text-to-speech support for dictionary headwords and example sentences, giving them their own audio play icons.
Language - Configure which language Pleco will recognize spoken text in by default. (“System Language” will use your currently configured iOS UI language; this will only work if you have a dictionary installed in that language)
Disable Audio Session - Prevent Pleco from starting a system audio session, useful to work around bugs in some hearing aids + Bluetooth headsets.
Other app-wide options
Sidebar button everywhere - Show the sidebar button even in lower-level screens like dictionary definitions (next to the back button) rather than confining it only to top-level ones. (hint: you can tap-hold on that button anywhere in Pleco to instantly jump to the main search screen with the keyboard open)
Rearrange sidebar sections - Rearrange the order of items in Pleco’s sidebar menu to make it easier to get at your most-used sections. (feel free to move “Add-ons” to the bottom, we just want to make sure people know it’s there)
Enable (right edge swipe) - Add another sidebar on the right side of the screen (only accessible via a swipe gesture) with a customized list of favorite sections and settings.
Configure favorites - Configure which items appear in this favorites sidebar.
Configure shortcuts - Configure which items are available through 3D Touch shortcuts from your device’s home screen.
Search for clipboard text - Enable this option to automatically search the contents of your iPhone’s clipboard when Pleco opens, making it a bit faster to look up words in other applications. (this only happens if the clipboard has been changed since Pleco was last exited)
Only if contains Chinese - Only do this if the clipboard contains Chinese characters.
Use reader if length > - Set a threshold above which Pleco will look up the pasteboard contents in the Clipboard Reader rather than putting them in the Input Field; this way, you can quickly translate larger blocks of text (text messages, emails, etc).
Open Web Reader for URL - If a URL is detected in the clipboard on startup, open the web reader with that URL.
OCR latest photo - If a new photo has been taken since you last opened Pleco, pull up OCR with that photo (requires iOS 8)
Limit to screenshots - Only pull up OCR on the new photo if it’s a screenshot (requires iOS 9)
Only if taken within - Only do this if the photo was taken within the last X minutes.
Check for database updates - Automatically check for updated versions of your installed dictionary (and other add-on) databases once a week, and pop up an alert if any are found.
Open search keyboard - Open the keyboard in the main dictionary search screen.
Permanently disable web - Permanently disable all of Pleco’s built-in web browser functions, for use by schools / users with young children / anyone else who wishes to control internet access on their iOS device. There’s no password, once you enable this option it cannot be disabled (even with “reset all settings” command); the only way to disable it is to delete and reinstall Pleco.
Fix startup password prompts - Dismiss completed in-app purchase transactions immediately rather than waiting for confirmation from our server first; this can fend off an iOS bug that causes a password prompt to show up every time you reopen the app because the system thinks that your transactions are still pending.
Compact databases - Clean up Pleco’s user dictionary and flashcard database files, saving space and possibly making them run a bit faster if done after deleting a lot of flashcards / entries.
Fix invisible categories - Remove invisible flashcard categories and category assignments; these could be caused by database corruption (or some old bugs) and could waste storage space and prevent cards from showing up in “Uncategorized” when they should.
Crash Reporting - Configure how Pleco handles the reporting of crashes to our support department
Save history in cloud - Save your search / viewed entry history in iCloud so that it can also be viewed on other devices that sync with your iTunes account.
Disable touch scrollbar - Disable the draggable scrollbar on the right side of search result lists, useful if you find yourself tapping on it by accident.
Show flash status in list - Show an icon in search results indicating whether or not each entry is in flashcards; this actually uses a good bit of processing power, so we disable it on the iPhone 4 and discourage its use on anything less than an iPhone 5 / iPad 4th-gen.
Monitor split-screen clipboard - Monitor the clipboard while the Pleco search screen is visible on an iPad in split-screen mode, and update the search field when the clipboard changes.
Hide voice rec key - Hide the voice recognition button that appears above the keyboard on iOS 10 (if you find it’s taking up too much space).
Options when your device is in portrait (tall) orientation.
Embed definition - Display the definition of the currently-selected dictionary entry will be displayed right on the main screen, rather than in a separate view.
Location: - Location of this embedded definition on the screen.
Smaller - Shrink this embedded definition (thus making the search result list larger)
Layout of text in lists of search results; configured separately for Chinese-English and English-Chinese results
List layout - Determines which parts of each dictionary entry are included in the list, and how they’re arranged. There are lots of choices here, but they’re described by a simple system. “Head,” “Pron,” and “Defn” refer to the headword, pronunciation (Chinese-English only), and definition respectively. When they appear separated by a space - “Head Pron” for example - that means they appear in the same line of text, separated on that line by a space. When they appear separated by a / - “Head / Defn” for example - that means that they appear on separate lines. So, “Head Pron / Defn” would mean the headword and pronunciation appear together on the first line of each Entry List item, then the definition follows on the next line. “Head / Pron / Defn” would have the headword, pronunciation, and definition all on different lines, and “Head Pron Defn” would have them all appear in a single block.
# defn lines: - Determines how many lines of each entry definition are displayed in the list.
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Unknown search - Adds a prompt to the top of any unknown Chinese character search results to create a custom flashcard or user dictionary entry:
Ignore - Don’t show a prompt at all
Card - Prompt to create a custom flashcard based on the search characters.
Entry - Prompt to create a user dictionary entry based on the search characters.
Card + Entry - Prompt to create a user dictionary which will then also be added to flashcards.
Intelligent segmentation - With this option enabled, Pleco will attempt to break down long strings of text that don’t have matches in the dictionary more intelligently; this hurts performance somewhat, but is helpful if you habitually paste sentences in the search box to look them up (rather than using our document reader).
Flexible Pinyin splits - With this option enabled, Pleco will search for any combination of Pinyin syllables that matches the spelling of your search query, assuming you haven’t entered tones or other marks to specifically split them - “xian” will match both “xian” and “xi’an” and “changan” will match both “chang’an” and “changan.” Disable this option and Pleco will require mid-word syllables beginning with a vowel to have a space, apostrophe, or tone number in front of them, so “xian” would only match “xian.”.
Search for umlauts on ’u’s - With this option enabled, Pleco treats Pinyin u and ü as the same character; enter a ‘u’ and you’ll see matches for both. With it disabled, you’ll have to type an actual ü or a v to enter syllables like lü.
Fuzzy English matching - With this option enabled, words that are spelled differently in different dialects of English will match against any spelling variation - “colour” will match “color” and vice versa.
Sort Chinese by Pinyin - with this option enabled, search results will not be sorted by frequency but instead simply by Pinyin + length.
All-caps -> full-width - With this option enabled, capital-letter-only search strings will be interpreted as full-width (= Chinese) characters, useful for Chinese words containing English letters like “ka3la1 OK.”
System keyboard Zhuyin input - Force the iOS system Zhuyin keyboard to enter raw Zhuyin instead of Chinese characters, useful for searching in Zhuyin.
Jump to appended word - Scroll to the most recently added word in a multi-word breakdown.
Cycle between C/E - With this option enabled, you can use the dictionary / dictionary group switch button (to the right of the search field) to switch between English and Chinese searches as well as between individual search dictionaries / groups.
Integrate E-C fulltext - With this option enabled, searches in Pleco for English words will span both English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English dictionaries, searching the full text of entries in the latter.
Integrate C-E fulltext - As above, but for Chinese words.
Dict search order - This controls the priority order in which dictionaries / dictionary groups are searched.
From Current - Begin each search with the currently-selected dictionary or group.
From First - Begin each search with the first dictionary or group in the search order (as configured in Manage Dictionaries / Dictionary Groups). Note that this will not apply in the popup definition bubble; for that, you’ll want to disable “Sticky Dict Selection” in its own settings screen instead.
Current Only - Only search for words in the current dictionary and don’t check any others unless you specifically switch into them.
Options relating to Pleco’s Chinese handwriting input add-on.
Recognize Simplified - Enables recognition of Simplified characters (used in Mainland China and Singapore) in the handwriting recognizer.
Include Rare Simplified - Enables recognition of less common simplified characters, at the expense of more false positives / incorrect results (the more characters Pleco can potentially recognize, the more likely it is to match what you drew to the wrong character).
Recognize Traditional - Enables recognition of Traditional characters (used in Taiwan and Hong Kong) in the handwriting recognizer.
Include Rare Traditional - As above, enables recognition of less common traditional characters.
Include Extra-rare - Adds support for characters from Unicode Extension A, which include some rare / old characters and uncommon simplified versions of a few common traditional characters.
Include Radicals - Adds support for common radicals and character components (that are not standalone characters themselves)
Alpha (lower right) - Enables support for entering alphabet letters (a-z) by drawing them in the bottom right 2/3 of the handwriting input window; particularly useful for mixed Pinyin/character searches. As soon as the start / end of a stroke lands outside of that box, Pleco will interpreting what you’ve drawn as a Chinese character instead of a letter.
Recognize numbers - Recognizes numbers as well as letters, though this can hurt accuracy for alphabet letters (since it’s easy for the system to confuse 0/o or 5/s).
Clear after 1 stroke - Clears the handwriting input box after drawing a single stroke inside of the alphabet recognition area, which makes alphabet input a bit faster (since you don’t have to keep clearing after every letter). All 26 letters can be entered with one stroke - for letters with more than one stroke, you can generally just join the strokes together (capital ‘A’ for example works sort of like drawing part of a 5-pointed star). Some letters tend to work better when entered in lowercase and some in uppercase (they’ll be recognized as lowercase regardless). The trickiest letter to figure out with one stroke is ‘I’ - the best way to enter an I is generally to draw an inverted ‘T’.
Recognize Cursive - Improves the handwriting recognizer’s support for cursive (Chinese) handwriting, at the expense of a few more false matches for non-cursive (stroke-by-stroke). Clearly-drawn cursive characters should be recognized even with this option disabled, but enabling it increases its tolerance for joined strokes.
Line thickness - Configure how thick the line you draw with your finger appears in the drawing box, from Very Thin to Very Thick. (the default in Pleco 3.0 is “Thin”)
Background - Configures the background of the handwriting input box.
Plain Gray - Draws a plain gray background that matches the default toolbar color on iOS. (it’ll turn black for Night Mode)
Blank - Draw a higher-contrast plain white (or in Night Mode, black) background.
Transparent - Makes the background transparent, so that you can view search results while entering characters. Only an option on iPhone/iPod at present.
Alpha Box - Draw a Plain Gray background with a box around the area for entering letters for the Alpha option above.
Instructions - Draw a Plain Gray background with explanatory text describing how to clear / backspace with a two-finger gesture.
2x2 Grid - Draw a Plain Gray background with a 2x2 grid to help in drawing characters correctly.
2x2 + Diag - Draw a Plain Gray background with a 2x2 grid and diagonal lines.
3x3 Grid - Draw a Plain Gray background with a 3x3 grid.
Disable after tap char - (Transparent background only) Disables the handwriting recognizer after you tap on one of the recognition results; you can then scroll / tap on dictionary search results without exiting the handwriting recognizer. To re-enable it, tap on the ON/OFF button at the bottom of the screen.
Use full screen - (iPad only) Uses the full screen for the handwriting input system on iPad; normally, it’s confined to a palette at the bottom of the screen.
Landscape bar loc - (non-Transparent backgrounds only) Configure where the bar on the side of the handwriting recognizer screen (where the Done / backspace buttons and character choices are located) is positioned when your iPhone is in landscape (wide) orientation. As in “Location” under Main Screen Layout above, along with “Left” and “Right” options here there are also “Device Top” and “Device Bottom” - these put the bar in that location on the phone, regardless of whether it’s been turned to the left or right. So with “Device Bottom,” the bar would appear on the side of the screen closest to the iPhone’s Home Button / cable connector - if you’ve turned the iPhone left, that would put it on the right side of the screen, while if you’ve turned the iPhone right that would put it on the left side.
Show 2nd chars on tap - With this option enabled, when you tap on a character in the list of recognizer results, it replaces that list with a list of the most frequent characters that follow the character you selected, making it easier to enter multi-character words. (this option is always disabled in flashcard fill-in-the-blanks tests)
Show on clear too - With this option enabled, the above list will also come up when you tap inside of the drawing box with two fingers to clear it.
Disable erase gesture - Disable the two-tap gesture to clear the handwriting input box (so that it will only clear when you tap on the backspace button).
Options relating to Pleco’s built-in radical input system.
(iPad only) Uses the full screen for the radical input system on iPad; normally, it’s confined to a palette at the bottom of the screen.
Character set filter - With this option enabled, tapping on a radical that’s specific to Simplified or Traditional characters (i.e., one that always appears differently in the other character set) will only show you characters with the radical in that character set; otherwise, tapping on (for example) the simplified-character speech radical would show you characters that contain both the simplified and traditional versions of that radical.
Include Rare - Include characters in the radical table that aren’t covered by any of your currently-installed dictionaries (though they may still be included in the Unihan database / Char Info screen).
Manage Dictionaries - Configure the order in which dictionaries are searched and enable / disable them in dictionary searches.
Manage Dictionary Groups - Create / configure dictionary groups, which allow you to perform a merged search on a subset of your installed dictionaries rather than all of them.
Options relating to Pleco’s dictionary definition display screen.
Show dict slider - Show a slider bar at the bottom of the definition screen to let you quickly see which dictionaries have definitions available for the current word and jump to the definition for a specific dictionary.
Show example toggles - Show a toggle button next to each dictionary’s header to show / hide inline example sentences (making it easier to quickly scan through)
+ button for each dict - Put a flashcard / bookmark add button at the start of every individual dictionary entry, making it easy to create a flashcard or bookmark from a specific entry instead of just creating it from the first entry listed (as happens when you tap on the + button on the top of the screen).
+ button for each example - Put a flashcard / bookmark add button at the end of each example sentence, making it easy to create flashcards or bookmarks from those.
Don’t append UNI info - Don’t add information from the Unihan database (shown with a UNI header) to the bottom of the dictionary definition box for single character entries.
Dict hiding - Configure how Pleco hides and shows definitions from specific dictionaries.
Remember - Remember the hidden status of each dictionary (you can tap on its abbreviation to show / hide it) and restore this when you scroll to a different word.
Remember + open first - As above, but if this results in every dictionary being hidden, temporarily show the first dictionary so that at least one entry is visible.
Hide all - Always hide all dictionaries, so that you can show each one by tapping on its abbreviation.
Hide + open first - As above, but always show the first dictionary listed and only leave the others hidden.
Show all - Always show all dictionaries, regardless of whether or not you’ve hidden them previously.
Background - Change the background image of stroke order diagrams; you can replace the default blank background with a 2x2 or 3x3 grid or a 2x2 grid with diagonal lines.
Show outline - Show outlines of characters in the stroke order diagram screen.
Fade strokes - Fade the color of strokes (from black through progressively lighter shades of gray) depending on how late they appear in the character’s stroke order. This works best in characters that have a small number of strokes.
Bold font - Makes horizontal strokes in stroke order diagrams thicker, which may improve their appearance for some users.
Drawing speed - Control how quickly stroke order diagrams animate, from Very Slow to Very Fast.
Exclude beginning from containing - Show only words that don’t start with a character in the “Words Containing” section of the “Words” tab.
Don’t filter pronunciation - Disable pronunciation filtering, so that characters with multiple pronunciations will pull up results in WORDS regardless of whether or not the pronunciation of the character in the word matches the one in your current dictionary definition.
Sort beginning by frequency - Sort the list of words starting by frequency.
Sort containing by frequency - Sort the list of words containing by frequency.
Prioritize flash in beginning - Put words in your flashcard database on top of the list of words starting.
Prioritize flash in containing - Put words in your flashcard database on top of the list of words containing
Max number of examples - Set the maximum number of example sentences to display the “Sents” tab.
Flip buttons left-to-right - Flip the position of the arrows in the toolbar so that the arrows used to move the highlight are on the left, while those used to resize it are on the right. This puts the move arrows closer to the thumb position for left-handed users, possibly making them easier to operate with one hand.
Flip bars top/bottom - Flip the position of the toolbars on the top / bottom of the screen, so that the arrows used to adjust the current selection are at the top instead of the bottom. (may be a more comfortable finger location for some people)
Show copy button - Adds a button to the popup definition which you can tap on to copy the currently-highlighted word to the clipboard.
Show zoom button - Adds a button to the popup definition which you can tap on to display a magnified version of the currently-highlighted word.
Sticky dict selection - Remember the last manually-selected dictionary and default to that dictionary when reopening the popup reader / advancing to a new word.
Auto-play audio on tap - Automatically play audio after tapping on a word to select it or tapping on one of the arrow buttons to move to a different word. (you can also toggle this option on/off by tap-holding on the reader audio button)
Unknown flashcard - Determines what happens when you tap on the add-to-flashcards button with a string of text selected that’s not in any of Pleco’s dictionaries.
Ignore - Don’t create the card at all.
Truncate - Create a card out of the longest matching word at the start of the selection (possibly just a single character)
Custom Card - Bring up a prompt to create a custom flashcard based on the selection.
Custom Dict Entry - Bring up a prompt to create a user dictionary entry based on the selection, adding the resulting dictionary entry to flashcards.
Save on selection change - Save the current word to the Reader section of history whenever you move to a new word with the arrow buttons or by adjusting the selection handles, as opposed to the default behavior of only saving it when you tap on a word.
The below options apply only when looking up words in Pleco’s document reader module.
Tap side of screen to move - With this option enabled, tapping on the left or right side of the screen with the definition bubble visible will cause the highlight to move left or right to the previous / next word, which may be easier than going all the way down to the toolbar on iPad especially.
Anchor to bottom - with this option enabled, the popup reader “bubble” will always remain at the bottom of the screen rather than moving around depending on the text selection location.
Don’t dismiss on > - Don’t dismiss the popup reader “bubble” when pressing the > button to view its definition in a separate screen.
Shrink definition - Reduces the size of the onscreen dictionary definition in live OCR, leaving more space for the video and more room for characters.
Shrink buttons - Reduces the size of the live OCR control buttons.
Tap video to pause - With this option enabled, you can tap anywhere in the video area to pause the recognizer.
Only while held down - Enable this option too and the recognizer will immediately un-pause when you lift your finger from the screen (though you can drag your finger down while paused to “lock” this and require a tap to unpause).
Tap video to resume - With this option enabled, you can tap anywhere in the video area to resume the recognizer when it’s paused.
Enable - Activates our advanced “motion detection” system, which uses input from your device’s motion sensors along with advanced video analysis techniques to detect when the camera (or the thing it’s pointing at) is moving and pause the recognizer when it’s not (avoiding “jitter” when it keeps re-recognizing the same characters).
Mode - Determines how Pleco detects that your device is moving; Motion Sensor uses the built-in acceleration sensor and gyroscope, Video Analysis analyzes the difference between frames of video, and Sensor + Video combines both techniques. In general, we recommend keeping this on “Sensor + Video,” but if your hands are very shaky you may find that “Video Analysis” by itself works better, or if you want to save battery life or are in a situation where there’s lots of other movement going on the images you’re looking at (subtitles / street signs, e.g.), “Motion Sensor” by itself might work better.
Delay before pause - Determines how long Pleco waits for the device to stop moving before it automatically pauses the recognizer.
Resume only with button - With this option enabled, after automatically pausing the recognizer Pleco won’t un-pause it until you manually tap on the “resume” button.
Sensor-only while paused - In “Sensor + Video” mode, this option disables Pleco’s video analysis system while paused and checks to see if the device has started moving again with the motion sensor alone; this saves a lot of battery life (video analysis is very processor-intensive).
Pause threshold - Determines the level of video motion below which the recognizer will automatically pause; if you set this to 50%, the recognizer will only pause when the device is moving at half the speed it would pause at with this set to 100%. So in other words, if you find that the recognizer is pausing too much (i.e. while you’re still moving the device), you should increase this setting, while if you find that it’s pausing too little (i.e. not pausing when you’re holding the device steady), you should decrease it.
Resume threshold - determines the level of video motion above which the recognizer will automatically resume when paused; if you set this to 50%, the device will only have to be moving at half the speed to automatically resume that it would have to be moving at with this set to 100%. So in other words, if you find that the recognizer is resuming too soon (i.e., it starts recognizing again while you’re still pointing at the same word), you should increase this setting, while if you find that it’s resuming too late (i.e., you start moving the device but the recognizer remains paused), you should decrease it. It’s usually best to keep the Pause and Resume threshold values at the same percentage (both 80%, both 110%, etc);you should only set them to different values if you find that one function is triggering at the correct speed and the other isn’t. If you do change them separately, we recommend that you not set the pause threshold more than 20 percentage points higher than the resume threshold - you might experience strange behavior otherwise.
Ignore zoom factor - normally, when you zoom in on a live video image the software reduces the number of pixels required to trigger the motion detector by the current zoom factor; for example, if it was 20 pixels at 1x it would be 10 pixels at 2x. This means that the on-screen distance required to trigger it remains the same - if moving a quarter of the screen width would trigger it at 1x then that same amount movement would also trigger it at 2x; however, if you hold the phone at the same distance from the page, it’ll take half as much physical movement to trigger the motion detector at 2x. With this option enabled, we keep the number of pixels required to trigger the sensor constant regardless of zoom factor; this means that at 2x you’ll have to move twice as far across the screen to trigger the sensor as at 1x, but it also means that if you hold the phone at the same distance from the page at 1x and 2x, the same amount of physical movement will trigger the motion detector. This may be useful if you find that the system is too jittery / detects motion when you don’t want it to when you’re zoomed in.
Pause attitude - Determines the pause threshold for changes to the device’s attitude, i.e. the way it’s oriented relative to the surface of the earth.
Pause rotation - Determines the resume threshold for changes to the device’s attitude.
Pause acceleration - Determines the pause threshold for changes to the device’s rate of rotation, i.e. how quickly its orientation is changing.
Resume attitude - Determines the resume threshold for changes to the device’s rate of rotation.
Resume rotation - Determines the pause threshold for changes to the device’s acceleration, i.e. which direction its velocity is increasing or decreasing in.
Resume acceleration - Determines the resume threshold for changes to the device’s acceleration.
Max defn update speed - Change this to something other than “None” to limit the speed at which the dictionary definition will update, useful if you find that it changes too frequently.
Auto white-on-black - Enable auto-detection of black-on-white and white-on-black text.
Word detect samples - Configure how many frames in a row the recognizer has to see the same text before “locking on” to it; increasing this number will make the definition change more slowly / become less “jittery” in general, while decreasing it will make it more responsive.
Word detect compare length - Configure the number of characters at the start of the word that have to match in order for the system to “lock on”; consider increasing this number if you capture a lot of long words.
Sauvola binarization - Enable a special image-processing mode that does a better job of dealing with unevenly-lit text (shadow in the curve of a page in a book, e.g.) but at the expense of much a much slower framerate / less responsive updates.
Shrink big images (faster) - When holding the camera very close to the page, characters can actually get so large that they have far more detail than the OCR system needs or cares about; this shrinks them before sending them to the recognizer, greatly improving performance.
Allow multiple lines - Turning this on keeps the recognizer from assuming that it’s looking at a single line of text, so that it won’t get mixed up and think that bits of characters it on the next / previous line are part of the characters you’re trying to scan; turning this off can improve performance but requires you to be a bit more exact in positioning the recognizer box in order to avoid garbled output.
Auto-play audio on lookups - With this option enabled, the system will automatically play the audio pronunciation for a word when you point the recognizer at it.
Delay before play - Enable this option and the system will wait until it’s been displaying the same word for a set amount of time before playing audio for it
Delay before card add - Time after “locking on” to a word that the system waits before adding it to flashcards.
Beep on card add - Play a beeping noise whenever the system creates a card.
Combine captured text - Combines the results of all Capture Text outputs in a particular session; in other words, each time you tap on the capture button, it appends the captured text to the previous output instead of replacing it, so that you end up with a collection of all of the text you’ve captured since opening OCR.
Default to edit mode - Open the capture text document reader screen up in editor instead of reader mode, so that you can easily edit / correct the text before saving or copying it.
Newline removal - Configure how Pleco stripes newlines out of captured text; “Remove All” removes all newlines, “Remove Soft” removes single newlines separating lines in a paragraph of text, and “Disabled” leaves all newlines intact.
Low-resolution mode - Use less than the camera’s maximum video capture resolution for live OCR, improving performance and (in most cases) accuracy as well.
Hide chars when paused - Hides all overlay characters (even highlighted ones) when the recognizer is paused.
New OCR System - Enable our new experimental OCR system.
Live resolution - Configure capture resolution for experimental OCR.
Shrink definition - Shrinks the size of the onscreen dictionary definition in still image OCR, leaving more space for the image and more room for characters.
Shrink buttons - Shrinks the size of the still image OCR control buttons.
Auto white-on-black - Enable auto-detection of black-on-white and white-on-black text.
Sauvola binarization - Enable a special image-processing mode that does a better job of dealing with unevenly-lit text (shadow in the curve of a page in a book, e.g.) but at the expense of much a much slower framerate / less responsive updates.
Shrink all images (faster) - In big, high-resolution images, characters can actually get so large that they have far more detail than the OCR system needs or cares about; this shrinks them before sending them to the recognizer, greatly improving performance. In “Block Recognizer” mode this option is changed to “Shrink all images (faster)” and applies to all images.
Allow multiple lines - Turning this on keeps the recognizer from assuming that it’s looking at a single line of text, so that it won’t get mixed up and think that bits of characters it on the next / previous line are part of the characters you’re trying to scan; turning this off can improve performance but requires you to be a bit more exact in positioning the recognizer box in order to avoid garbled output.
Combine captured text - Combines the results of all text captures in a particular session; in other words, each time you tap on the capture button, it appends the captured text to the previous output instead of replacing it, so that you end up with a collection of all of the text you’ve captured since opening OCR.
Default to edit mode - Open the capture text document reader screen up in editor instead of reader mode, so that you can easily edit / correct the text before saving or copying it.
Newline removal - Configure how Pleco strips newlines out of captured text; “Remove All” removes all newlines, “Remove Soft” removes single newlines separating lines in a paragraph of text, and “Disabled” leaves all newlines intact.
Settings relating to Pleco’s document reader module.
Don’t save clipboards - Don’t keep a history of previously looked up clipboards (useful if you have a habit of looking up information in sensitive materials that way.
Start page - Determines the page displayed when the Document Reader’s built-in web browser is initially opened.
Vertically scroll PDFs - Scroll PDF documents vertically instead of horizontally.
Fix broken fonts - Fix broken Chinese fonts in PDFs on iOS 9 by instalilng some extra iOS system font resources the first time you open a PDF each time you run Pleco.
Don’t queue audio independently - Display lyrics for whatever is currently playing on the system music player (note that this won’t work for podcasts) rather than choosing audio to play independently.
Back button goes back - Determines the number of seconds to rewind the audio when you tap on the circular rewind button in the Lyrics Reader.
Pause on word lookup - Automatically pauses the audio playback when you tap on a word to look it up, and resumes playback when you tap outside of the popup bubble to exit.
Configure options relating to Pleco’s flashcard add-on. (this turns into a “Bookmarks” panel if you haven’t bought the flashcard add-on)
Duplicate (in cat) - Configures how Pleco handles duplicate cards that are already in the category you’ve chosen to add them to (by tap-holding on the + button).
Skip - Do nothing, don’t create a new card or modify any existing one.
Update text - Update the card’s definition if the current dictionary entry differs from it.
Remove category - Remove the existing card from the selected category but don’t otherwise modify or delete it.
Delete card - Completely remove the existing card (and its review history) from your flashcard database.
Remove + delete - Remove the existing card from the selected category, then check to see if it’s part of any other categories; if not, delete it. (basically turning + into a toggle button)
Create new card - Create a new card anyway.
Card Info - Bring up the detailed Card Info screen with categories / scores / etc.
Prompt - Pop up a dialog box asking what you’d like to do.
Duplicate (non cat) - Configures how Pleco handles duplicate cards that are not already in the category you’ve chosen to add them to.
Skip - Do nothing, don’t create a new card or modify any existing one.
Update text - Update the card’s definition if the current dictionary entry differs from it.
Add to category - Add the existing card to the selected category but don’t otherwise modify it. (it’ll remain in its old categories too)
Add + update - Add the card to selected category and update its definition if the current dictionary entry differs from it.
Delete card - Completely remove the existing card (and its review history) from your flashcard database.
Create new card - Create a new card anyway.
Card Info - Bring up the detailed Card Info screen with categories / scores / etc.
Prompt - Pop up a dialog box asking what you’d like to do.
Enable English-to-Chinese - Enables (somewhat experimental) support for English-to-Chinese flashcards. This will allow you to create flashcards from English-to-Chinese dictionary entries (the button will be disabled otherwise), and adds options to the Import and Export screens to select the language for text-based imports and exports, adds an option to Card Filters to select which language you’d like to study cards in, and adds an option to Search Cards to find cards by their language.
Default category - Selects the category which new cards will be added to by default; this affects flashcards created anywhere except by a flashcard import, or by the Organize Cards screen once you’ve gone into a specific category (with those it’s added to that category instead).
Change on tap-hold - with this option enabled, when you tap-hold on the Add Card button to choose a specific category for your new card, the category you select will become the new default category for future card adds.
List layout - Configure the layout (headword/pronunciation/definition) of flashcard fields in Organize Cards.
# defn lines: - Configure the number of definition lines visible in Organize Cards.
Show card statistics - Add an additional line of statistics to each card, giving you the card’s score, easiness factor, record of correct/incorrect answers, and last reviewed date.
Enable iCloud sync - Enable synchronization of your Pleco flashcard database between multiple devices over iCloud. This should work almost invisibly - the database will sync to iCloud every time you put Pleco in the background and those updates will quietly be pushed to other devices; in fact, if you have a good internet connection you can literally add a flashcard to a particular category on one device and watch it magically appear in Organize Cards on the other. When you enable this option, Pleco will automatically creates a backup of your flashcard database in its document folder; we recommend making additional backups regularly, since while iCloud is generally pretty stable / reliable now it nonetheless introduces another potential point of failure for flashcard data loss.
Disable iCloud sync - Disable iCloud synchronization of your flashcard database on this device. It will not affect any other devices that sync with iCloud - basically it just makes a local copy of your current flashcard database, starts using that instead of the iCloud one and leaves the iCloud database untouched.
Delete iCloud database - Delete an inactive iCloud flashcard database; this option will appear after you’ve enabled and then disabled iCloud sync (leaving a flashcard database behind). It should not be used unless you’ve already disabled iCloud sync on all of your other devices, since the flashcard databases on those devices may be deleted otherwise.
Erase Database - This button permanently erases your entire flashcard database, allowing you to get a fresh start with a clean new database. (useful if you feel like it’s gotten bloated with too many cards and don’t want to delete cards individually / with a batch command)
Configure options relating to Pleco’s file manager / file sharing systems.
Unlink Dropbox Account - Unlink your Dropbox account from Pleco.
Show file extensions - Shows file type extensions (.txt, .doc, .html, etc) for files in the reader’s file browser, and allows you to change those extensions when renaming files.
Show hidden files - Shows hidden files (mainly Pleco’s document bookmark files) in the file browser, making it easier for you to back them up.
Save last path - Save / return to the last directory path opened when opening a new file (or OCR image).
Custom server port - With this option enabled, the number after the colon (TCP port number) in the file upload screen can be customized from its default value of 50505.
Port - Configures that number - set it to 0 to use a different number each time you open Pleco. If you don’t have a specific reason to change this setting, we recommend leaving it as-is.
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