Added new experimental Kai-style stroke order diagrams. These are free for anybody who owns (or purchases) our current Stroke Order Diagrams add-on; go into Registration / Check for other purchases to activate them and you should then see them as available to download in Add-ons / Purchased but not Downloaded (or Features). Toggle between those and the existing Song-style stroke order diagrams by tapping on the button at the bottom left corner of the stroke order box.
These are “experimental” because they only cover a subset of the characters our full stroke order diagrams do + have not been as exhaustively checked; they come from the open-source Make Me A Hanzi project. We are aiming to have our own set of Pleco-developed Kai-style stroke order diagrams available sometime in 2017, with greater character set coverage, thorough checking against official stroke order standards, and some nifty new features like Taiwan-specific style / stroke order variations.
Added an option in Settings / Search Interface to hide the voice recognition button.
Added an option to our experimental OCR system to force it to use the telephoto camera on the iPhone 7+, as we have not yet managed to get automated switching between cameras working reliably.
Added taptic feedback to the radical and dictionary screen slider bars (‘show dict slider’ in Settings / Definition Screen) on the iPhone 7 and 7+. We’re working to add taptic feedback in other places, but we’re trying not to get carried away; this seemed like a good place to do it first since it’s consistent with other parts of iOS (sliders in contacts e.g. likewise provide taptic feedback).
Fixed an audio dropout bug when using voice recognition.
Fixed a crash when using English TTS on pre-iOS–10 devices.
Fixed a crash when trying to open Lyrics Reader on iOS 10. (we have not yet found a way to fetch Apple Music lyrics, however)
Fixed a bug that made TTS fail to actually start recording the first time it’s invoked.
Fixed a bug that made bundles show up in item detail screens in Add-ons even when you already own / are no longer able to purchase them.
Redesigned all of our toolbar icons for iOS 7/8 (finally!). We thought we’d do this now because a) it was embarrassing we hadn’t done it already, b) we want to let you get used to new icons before we rearrange things a bit in 3.3, and c) we’re worried Apple is going to redesign everything again in iOS 9 in which case we’d like to be current for at least a few weeks before they do :-)
Added new seal script and Caoshu font add-ons.
Added an “Alternate Fonts” section to the CHARS tab to let you quickly see a character in all of your purchased alternative fonts. (tap on one of the characters here to view it fullscreen)
Added (at long last!) the ability to customize the sort order of categories in Organize Cards. Tap on the sort arrow next to the magnifying glass button at the top of Organize to enable this. You can sort by anything that you can sort by in Search Cards, can apply a change to a individual category or to a category and all of its children, and can convert a fixed sort order to a custom one if you want to for example sort all of your cards by Pinyin but then adjust that order a bit.
Added a brand new search filtering feature for Chinese searches (characters + pronunciation included); to use it, just put a # followed by an English word (or phrase) after the Chinese portion of your search. This will filter the results to only include entries in which that English word / phrase appears. For example, “gao#tall” will return only characters pronounced “gao” with “tall” in their definitions. Prefix searches are supported - “ji#chicken” will match not only “ji” but also “jia,” “jian,” etc - so if you want to limit it to just the exact search term you entered, put a space before the #. We’ll be doing much more with this in future releases.
Added a brand new backup / restore mechanism for settings (including dictionary order + dictionary groups) and history (including your dictionary, reader, and OCR history and your recent clipboard reader clippings); it’s listed at the bottom of Settings. This exports data in relatively clean XML, so it’s hackable, and one type of hack that might be particularly useful would be to export just your color settings, remove any that are not tone colors, and distribute that file as a sort of “tone color profile” which others can use. (we’ll be doing a whole lot more with this in future releases too) The format is fully cross-platform, so you can transfer settings / history between iOS and Android this way too.
Added a ‘show in dictionary’ icon to the optional dictionary switching toolbar in flashcards (which you can enable in the Commands section of New Test) - tap on this button to instantly bring up a dictionary definition screen for the current card. A cool extra feature of this is that it’ll also let you rapidly flick through your history of recently reviewed cards in this test via the scroll buttons at the top right corner of the screen.
Added options to delete the current card and to add it to the default category with a single tap in Card Info, and made Card Info an option for flashcard duplicate handling in Settings / Flashcards, this as part of a longer-term plan to replace the duplicate popup completely (with an expanded Card Info screen).
Added a male Cantonese audio add-on, and a new Cantonese audio gender preference in Settings / Audio when both are installed.
Added internal support for masking Registration IDs for use in school / institutional copies of Pleco where you don’t want your users to be able to see them (contact us if you’d like to set that up for your institution).
Added a search history toolbar item in the dictionary search screen on iPads, for faster access to recent searches.
Added a keyboard reopen button to the bottom right corner of the search result list on iPads (as we already offer on the iPhone 6/6+).
Prevented handwriting/keyboard input from reopening when doing a search in Pleco from an external app via our plecoapi: q? search URL scheme.
Added an “in=” field to the plecoapi: q? search URL scheme, allowing you to override the above change and make the input open after all; set in=“last” to open the last input method used, or hwr|rad|key to select one of those methods. (you can use this with a blank search to create an efficient link to open Pleco for a search in your favorite launcher app)
Made it possible for the PDF reader to bridge selections between multiple pages, so a word starting on one page and ending on the next should now be defined correctly.
Added abbreviation icons to the Manage Dicts and Manage Dict Groups screens so you have a slightly more convenient reference to what each abbreviation means.
Made EPUB files load in the background, and made that process cancelable, so you should no longer experience crashes when loading an extremely large / complicated EPUB on startup.
Moved all transactions with our activation server to a background thread, which should reduce the likelihood of Pleco hanging on startup or when otherwise trying to connect to activate a purchase in a situation where your internet connection is terrible-but-active.
Added swipe delete / remove options in Organize Cards, but the remove option will only show on iOS 8 (iOS 7 didn’t support easily adding multiple commands to a swipeable table row).
Prevented the screen from turing off in the Upload / Download Files screen.
Prevented the sketchbox from automatically hiding when rotating the screen during a flashcard test.
Made tone colors in flashcard tests update correctly when toggling Night Mode.
Removed useless blank toolbars from a few screens.
Improved reliability of restoring the last location in web-based documents (DOC, EPUB, etc).
Made the Pinyin filter for single characters in the WORDS tab apply to user dictionaries as well as Pleco-created ones.
Added overwrite options in all of the duplicate file prompts that didn’t already have them.
Removed the length limit on audio playback for selected text ranges in the reader.
Added a fast-scroll vertical scrollbar to the Help screen.
Improved visibility of elements in text input fields in Night Mode.
Added newlines in OCR definitions.
Rearranged the buttons in iPad fullscreen handwriting / radical screens for better consistency + clarity.
Added a long-press “jump to page #” option when OCRing PDF documents (just long press the next or previous page button)
Made the OCR flash indicator change if the flash is turned on.
Made TTS do a better job of avoiding annoying pauses / splits in the middle of words when reading long documents.
Made moving cards into Uncategorized cause them to be removed from all of their other categories.
Made the popup definition in Block Recognizer OCR use the “unknown word handling” option from the document reader instead of OCR (as in general the behavior of this particular OCR interface is closer to that of the document reader than of other OCR interfaces).
Made “show Zhuyin too” work for user dictionaries as well as non-user ones.
Added a “jump to appended word” option in Settings / Search Engine which will cause the search results to automatically scroll down to a newly added word if you’re entering a sentence breakdown one-word-at-a-time instead of all at once.
Made search results from custom dictionary groups only show definitions from dictionaries in that group in the definition screen (rather than aggregating definitions from all dictionaries).
Made user dictionaries and flashcards correctly support digits in headwords (useful for old SMS expressions, military unit numbers, etc).
Added a “tone skip character” - an inverted question mark ¿ - for user dictionary and flashcard headword and pinyin readings; this is basically a placeholder that eats up a syllable/character on the opposite side, so that tone colors will match up even if (say) you include the number 23 (two characters) in the headword versus the three syllables er-shi-san (you’d write it as 2¿3), or if you have a character with no reading (put a ¿ in its place in the pinyin field) or a reading with no character (put a ¿ in its place in the headword field). The importer will insert these automatically when importing digits. (to enter a ¿ on an iPhone system keyboard, simply hold down your finger on the ? key)
Improved the reliability of duplicate card detection for flashcards with letters and numbers in their headwords.
Made the background and header text colors for grouped tables (mainly seen in settings screens) customizable.
Made the popup reader reappear after returning from a separate definition screen spawned from the PDF viewer.
Added a new option in Settings / Miscellaneous to open a URL on the clipboard in Web Reader on startup.
Added numeric keys to the hex color input dialog for faster input of color codes.
Stopped listing “PY” bands at the top of individual dictionaries’ definitions when they differ only in capitalization (and not in tones).
Added a space between the audio and + buttons at the end of example sentences with English TTS enabled, and an extra space before the audio button in example sentences that end with a Chinese character rather than a punctuation mark.
Disabled the add to flashcard button + eliminated garbage text / unusable tabs / etc in the header when viewing a blank dictionary entry.
Added an All / None button to the dictionary list selection / reordering screen (e.g. when creating a new dictionary group or importing flashcards).
Stopped showing PY variants in definitions when Mandarin display is disabled, and tagged them with ZY instead of PY when Zhuyin pronunciation is set as the default.
Added a list of the current tag categories to the duplicate card dialog.
Added more robust protection against corruption / file format mismatches in saved flashcard sessions, which should result in fewer crashes when updating / reinstalling Pleco with a flashcard session in progress.
Excluded demo dictionaries from the Batch “Remap to dict” menu.
Added Facebook / Twitter / website / discussion forum links to our About page.
Updated to a slightly newer version of SQLite for a few % increase in user dictionary / flashcard performance.
Increased the maximum length of searches in history and the maximum number of saved entries in history.
Added a big DEMO to the background of the handwriting recognizer in demo mode.
Moved stroke order settings to the “Definition Screen” panel for consistency with Android + cleaner hierarchy in general.
Prevented swipes in the dictionary slider bar from triggering the system back gesture.
Changed the underlying emoji code for the text-to-speech icon from a coffee cup to a loudspeaker so that it’ll copy-and-paste more cleanly into other apps.
Made spaces at the end of Chinese character searches prevent longer matches (as they already do with English/Pinyin searches).
Made the flashcard dictionary switch button disabled (grayed out) when there’s no dictionary to switch to (either because the card is only in one dictionary or because it’s a custom card for which no dictionary match is available).
Improved support for the two different 阝 radicals (Kangxi numbers 163 and 170) in character decompositions - we now differentiate between them and give (we hope) the correct one + its correct definition for each character.
Made the flashcard “convert to custom” function available in our free app on iOS just as it is on Android.
Improved reliability of tap detection in the dictionary slider bar.
Tidied up iPad toolbar layouts a bit.
Started using “Today” / “Yesterday” in history dates where applicable.
Evened up spacing between abbreviation labels in the dictionary slider bar
Removed the {} brackets around Cantonese in OCR when Mandarin display is disabled.
Made the text color in highlighted dictionary entry table cells black instead of white when their highlight color is sufficiently light to make that the higher-contrast option.
Fixed a bug in the rendering of 茶 in our default XinGothic Chinese font.
Fixed garbled separator positioning in the tap-hold select copy bubble.
Fixed a bug that made the radical section appear in CHARS even for characters for which we couldn’t find radical info.
Fixed a bug that kept the scroll buttons in the definition screen from updating correctly when scrolling through lists of flashcards via the long-press “Dictionary” menu item in Organize.
Fixed a bug that caused unreliable character selection in the reader with pagination enabled (mostly on iPads).
Fixed a bug that could cause your dictionary sort order to be intermittently reset on startup if you had a lot of user dictionaries (or one that was particularly slow to open).
Fixed a bug that prevented file selections in External Files from actually being opened.
Fixed a bug that could cause a UNI entry with the wrong pronunciation to display when searching for a particular Mandarin or Cantonese syllable. (character would be correct but it would be a different pronunciation for a 多音字)
Fixed a bug that sometimes prevented English headwords in the SENTS tab from being bolded correctly.
Fixed a bug that could cause OCR history to get corrupted or out-of-sync when switching between two different OCR sessions.
Fixed a bug that made navigating between PDF pages with the popup definition unreliable in some cases.
Fixed some missing characters in our character decomposition database.
Fixed a bug that could prevent user dictionaries from matching correctly against long Pinyin syllables (zhuang and chuang and shuang).
Fixed a bug that could cause unreliable search results with intelligent segmentation and full-text Chinese searches enabled.
Fixed a bug that could cause intelligent segmentation to fail to include multi-character results containing characters which don’t have their own single-character entries.
Fixed a bug that could cause the same dictionary group to be searched twice on a query, resulting in significant slowdowns in some cases.
Fixed a bug that kept user dictionary copyrights from saving correctly + initially populated them with random garbage numbers.
Fixed a bug that could cause flashcards to get stuck on one audio gender or another when playing audio for cards with lots of letters or numbers (or other characters with no supplied Pinyin reading) in their headwords.
Fixed a bug that caused Mandarin to keep displaying in Organize Cards even if its display was turned off in settings.
Fixed a bug that prevented dot-separated abbreviations like “Washington D.C.” in full-text searches from matching without punctuation or spaces between the letters.
Fixed a bug that could prevent user dictionaries from being created at all if they shared their name with a previously created user dictionary.
Fixed unreliable sort order of recently created flashcards in History.
Fixed a bug that caused card statistics to be included in XML exports even with the option to export them disabled.
Fixed a bug that could cause incorrect counts of correct/incorrect cards to appear after undoing a card score when repeating incorrect cards.
Fixed a bug that could prevent categories in text exports from exporting in the correct order.
Fixed a bug that could cause occasional failures to return results from valid full-text searches.
Fixed a bug that could cause “VARIANT OF” text to appear as part of the first definition for a word instead of above it in cases where the “variant” status applied to all of the definitions.
Fixed a bug that kept [+] flashcard icons from appearing in some items in the CHARS tab.
Fixed some bugs in the (little-used) English wildcard search feature that could prevent matches from coming up correctly when they should be.
Fixed a bug that could cause incorrect character breakdowns or undesirable dictionary switching when your search text ends with a 儿/兒.
Fixed a bug that caused tone coloring in example sentences to fail to display correct tones in a flashcard test with examples enabled before the card is revealed.
Fixed a bug that prevented you from adjusting Pleco’s audio playback volume with the volume buttons until after you’d actually played an audio recording.
Fixed a bug that caused garbled text-to-speech output when dealing with headwords containing very obscure Chinese characters.
Fixed a bug that could prevent Cantonese from displaying correctly in UNI entries.
Fixed a bug that caused nonsensical text-to-speech output when using the built-in Apple TTS with a few rare syllables like “lia”.
Fixed crashes / unreliable behavior when adding flashcards from the long-press popup menu in the dictionary browser screen or history screen.
Fixed a bug that could cause rare characters to fail to display in a few places.
Fixed a bug that could cause characters after very rare characters to fail to display in search results.
Fixed excess padding at the top of dictionary definition screens spawned from the PDF reader.
Fixed a bug that made it impossible to adjust text selection handles on the extreme left edge of the screen in a document reader with pagination enabled.
Fixed a bug that could cause unreliable placement of the popup reader bubble in non-paginated text / clipboard reader documents, and an unrelated one that caused the same problem (albeit a bit more dramatically) in PDFs.
Fixed a bug that could make it impossible to open files in still OCR or the document reader when the directory they’re in only contains files with capitalized file extensions.
Fixed a bug that could make .zip files created in Pleco unreadable in a few Windows .zip clients.
Fixed a bug that could cause a new fill-in-the-blanks flashcard to start off with the wrong field selected.
Added dedicated undo and clear buttons to the flashcard sketch box.
Fixed a bug that prevented category filters from being included in the count of active filters shown next to Card Filters in New Test.
Fixed clipped / needlessly whitespace-padded long text display blocks in a few places.
Fixed a bug that could prevent recent searches from saving correctly when scrolling through entries immediately after entering a new search (mostly on iPads).
Fixed a bug that could sometimes cause erroneous user dictionary results to come up for searches containing unsearchable extra pronunciation characters.
Fixed awkward looking separator indents in the category selection screen for new tests.
Fixed a bug that could sometimes keep duplicate cards from being grouped together in the duplicate search in Search Cards.
Fixed a bug that prevented URLs containing whitespace from loading in Web Reader.
Fixed a bug that produced incorrect data in download status popups in Web Reader.
Fixed a bug that could cause Lyrics Reader playback to jump around on occasion.
Fixed a bug that kept the All/None in Organize from updating correctly after a move operation.
Fixed a bug that required an extra tap to open the keyboard in the flashcard tag editing + manage dictionaries abbreviation / name / etc editing alerts.
Fixed a bug that could prevent other dictionaries from being filled in correctly when bringing up the definition screen from a popup reader text selection with more than one matching entry in the current dictionary.
Fixed a bug that kept the history screen from filling in results from other dictionaries.
Fixed a bug that allowed user dictionaries to return shorter results even in situations where they shouldn’t (e.g. when mapping a custom flashcard to a dictionary entry).
Fixed a bug that could cause full-text matches to come up in some cases where they shouldn’t with the option to cycle to C-E fulltext searches enabled (again, e.g. when mapping a flashcard to a dictionary entry).
Fixed a bug that caused example sentences to be tone colored for Mandarin even with Cantonese tone coloring enabled.
Fixed a bug that made tap-hold selection of a specific dictionary from the dictionary switch button occasionally take you to an entirely different dictionary when done during a full-text search.
Fixed a whole bunch of crashing bugs.
Officially added vertical scrolling support to PDF documents (enable in Settings / Reader), after attempting to add it in 3.2.3 but accidentally leaving in a bug that made it unusable.
Added a separate “Copy Head” option to the tap-hold menu for result list items (and renamed the old option to “Copy Entry”).
Added a stroke count to the header of the “Radical” item in the CHARS tab.
Added support for automatically detecting + adjusting to a PDF document’s rotation in still OCR.
Added a settings icon to the Web Reader toolbar, and a single option to go with it: “Tap Lookups,” allowing you to temporarily disable tap lookups on a particular page, or to enable them even when tapping on hyperlinks.
Added a “Hex” button to the color picker screen to let you precisely enter hexadecimal colors (rather than having to fiddle around with the color wheel until they come up).
Made items in the WORDS / CHARS tabs match the indents of items in DICT / SENTS.
Added total file size information to the “Download All” buttons in Add-ons.
Improved PDF reader support for vertical text (the reader bubble will now do a better job of ensuring it doesn’t overlap it).
Added a list of the existing card’s current tag categories to the bottom of the duplicate card prompt.
Adjusted the way we configure speeds in the built-in iOS speech synthesizer in a way that should (hopefully) get it to speak a little more slowly (though it can’t be set as slow as we would ideally like).
Added an option in Test Settings to “enter immediately” if “Conceal handwriting until done” is enabled - this will immediately enter the best match for the character you drew, rather than showing you a list of results to pick from.
Added a few new tweaks to our dictionary entry formatting code for the sake of tidying up SDCMC entries a bit.
Made the options for disabling Mandarin pronunciation in Settings / Languages more obvious.
Added an alert the first time you run a fill-in-the-blanks flashcard test to point out that it’s only covering cards of 4 or fewer characters.
Made the add-ons catalog automatically refresh itself if more than an hour had passed since it was last visited.
Made the highlight color for the sidebar menu match your selected tint color.
Made vertical (top-to-bottom / right-to-left) EPUBs turn into horizontal ones, as a temporary measure until we manage to add full support for vertical EPUBs.
Fixed (we think) the cause of most of the “iCloud Inaccessible” messages people were seeing on startup - you might still see them in a few rare circumstances but they should be a lot less common at any rate.
Fixed a bug that could cause flashcard audio to fall back on male TTS when audio was configured to be female-only.
Fixed a bug that could prevent the Organize Cards screen from retaining its current category location after switching tabs on an iPad.
Fixed a nasty bug that could make web / DOC / EPUB tap selection more difficult than it needed to be (selection would fail to work if your finger moved a bit), especially on retina iPads.
Fixed a bug that could cause a ‘5’ to be pronounced at the end of ‘r’ syllables when playing audio through the built-in iOS system text-to-speech engine.
Fixed a bug that made the “Dictionary” screen come up with an empty search field (rather than the last search entered) if you reopen Pleco initially to the History screen.
Fixed margins + default fonts in a few more obscure settings screens.
Fixed a bug in our word wrapping algorithm that would allow abbreviations like e.g. to be split in the middle when they shouldn’t be.
Fixed a bug in our text highlighting code that could cause the draggable handles at the top / bottom of a selection to be slightly off the screen, or spaced slightly too far from it - particularly common with lines of text that had a lot of white space above them.
Fixed a bug that caused the non-fullscreen handwriting input box on iPad to default to the wrong side of the screen.
Fixed bugs that could cause the insertion point + selection handles to be invisible in a few text input fields with “tint toolbars” enabled.
Fixed a bug that made headers above the first sections of table views appear with an extra-large vertical margin.
Fixed a bug that caused an annoying bit of extra margin around text in the popup definition bubble.
Fixed a bug that could cause an unexpected extra scroll jump on keyboard open in our standard naming / renaming screen.
Fixed some odd screen resizing behavior on opening up an edit text field (e.g. the search box) in a reader document.
Fixed a bug that could cause search results to display the wrong text for a full-text result match (one line above the match instead of the match itself).
Fixed a bug that could cause it to be impossible to scroll some parts of PDF reader documents into view (though we’re still working on scroll positioning for those a bit in general).
Forced the “score immediately” option in Test Settings to always be on for Cantonese tone practice tests, since there’s no “check answer” button to do it manually.
Fixed a bug that caused auto-generated Cantonese readings to be based on simplified characters even with Pleco in traditional mode.
Fixed a bug that prevented the audio button from showing up in user dictionary entries with “pron system” set to “none.”
Fixed a bug that could prevent example sentences from appearing in some search results even when they were full-text results for which the highlighted text was part of the example sentence.
Fixed a bug that could cause automatic generation of characters / readings to fail in certain rare cases (mostly involving a sequence of the same character repeated several times in a row).
Fixed a bug that could cause dictionaries / dictionary groups to fail to switch correctly when performing a !# (sort flashcards first + full-text) search.
Fixed a bug that caused user dictionaries to sometimes match incorrectly against long words in the document reader (i.e., you’d have a situation where a string of 4 characters matched the first 4 characters of a 5-character word and that word’s entry would come up even though the 5th character didn’t match the next character in the document).
Fixed a bug that could cause the “change dictionary entry” command in Card Info to pull up entries with the wrong pronunciation if the current pronunciation was not included in whatever your first dictionary selected under Manage Dicts is.
Worked around bugs in iOS 8’s speech synthesizer and the Dropbox sync library respectively that might cause undesired network connections on app startup (and the attendant delay / bandwidth usage).
Fixed a whole bunch of crashing bugs.
Added full support for the new iPad, by adding Retina-display-friendly versions of all of our iPad-specific graphics and fixing a few other problems related to using Pleco on such a high-resolution screen (texture scaling issues in the handwriting recognizer, for example).
Added support for launching Pleco with a specific search query from an external link; the URL format is:
plecoapi://x-callback-url/s?q=(search term)
You can optionally add two other parameters to get Pleco to display a button to return to your app / website:
&x-source=(display name of your app)&x-success=(URL we should call when users tap that button)
The x-callback-url standard also includes x-error and x-cancel URLs to deal with errors and user request cancellations, but we don’t currently use those.
Changed the appearance of characters in traditional mode to better match the normal style in which they’re drawn in areas that use traditional characters; for example, the little box inside of the top part of 骨 will now appear on the correct side of the character.
Changed the behavior of the character set toggle button so that it now applies systemwide regardless of which screen you tap it in.
Improved support for multiple newlines in dictionary entries, and updated the built-in PLC dictionary database to take advantage of it.
Added an alert on startup offering to download CC-CEDICT if no add-on dictionaries are installed.
Released a new set of audio files (available through “Updates” in Add-ons) that are considerably louder and fix a number of bugs from the old ones.
Made the extended Unihan download prompt in Character Info actually offer to download the database for you immediately.
Added an option in Settings / General to disable the keyboard click sound in the tone bar (both in the main dictionary and in flashcards) - this will be done for you automatically in Pleco 2.3, but we can’t do it yet without dropping support for iOS 3.0/3.1, which we’re holding off on doing until we release that big new update.
Made the handwriting recognizer database a separate add-on download; however, users who installed a previous version of Pleco should find that the add-on is already there with no need to re-download it.
Made the flashcard “limit # of unlearned” option off by default in the Simple profile for new users.
Made the flashcard audio “Max replays” option off by default in all profiles for new users.
Added an alert the first time a flashcard test is run in which fewer cards are shown than would otherwise be shown due to “limit # of unlearned” being on.
Add a more informative alert when the audio button in flashcards is disabled due to “max replays” being set.
Added support for rendering Thai and re-added support for rendering Korean characters in dictionary entries and flashcards.
Eliminated the confusing “downloaded but not purchased” section of the add-on download screen.
Made the flashcard remap / import dict selection boxes say “all dicts” instead of “0 dicts” when no dictionaries were selected yet.
Fixed a bug that could cause the review of incorrect cards at the end of a flashcard test to show the wrong cards if you made extensive use of the “back” and “forward” commands during the test.
Fixed a bug that caused the web reader [>] button to fail to copy text correctly on iOS 5.1
Fixed a bug that could cause audio to occasionally fail to play correctly when very rapidly advancing through flashcards.
Fixed a bug that could make tapping on characters on the edge of the recognition area difficult in OCR Block Recognizer mode.
Fixed a bug that could cause the document reader to lose its place in a document after going several layers deep into dictionary definitions and then returning to the reader.
Fixed a bug that caused the “radical” indicator in Character Info to list a radical from the wrong character set (simplified or traditional).
Fixed a bug that could cause the pronunciation to fail to display in flashcards in Organize Cards that lacked a headword.
Fixed a bug that could cause the dictionary switch button to fail to cycle through the entire list of dictionaries when one of them was an empty user dictionary.
Fixed a bug that could crashes in XML flashcard exports of databases that made heavy use of the “priority” settings.
Fixed a bug that could cause weird behavior in fill-in-the-blanks tests when using very old flashcard databases transferred over from Palm/WM.
Fixed a bug that could cause extended audio to refuse to play if a non-extended audio file was downloaded after an extended one.
Fixed a bug that made it impossible to remove items from the Character Info “Details” screen on an iPad in landscape orientation.
Fixed a display glitch in the background of some items in the Manage Dictionaries details screen on iOS 5.
Fixed a bug that caused the startup resume download prompt to come up every time you started up Pleco, even if you indicated you did not want to resume downloads, until you actually went into the Add-ons screen.
Fixed a bug that prevented the “restore last tab” command from working correctly from the Add-ons and Settings tabs.
Fixed a bug that prevented “restore last query” from working correctly.
Fixed a rare crashing bug when entering text in the search box.
Fixed a bug that caused weird display of the date selection controls on iPads using Chinese localization.
Fixed a bug that could cause selected list items on the iPad to occasionally fail to display (so that you’d end up with a blank white row).
Fixed a bug that could cause the copy/paste “bubble” in text fields to fail to disappear when their contents changed.
Fixed a bug that made it impossible to select files to share / open / import in the deepest level of folders when “multi-level file move” was enabled.
Fixed a bug that could cause the multiple choice selections in flashcards to turn blank after adding a card to a new category.
Fixed several bugs relating to fill-in-the-blanks Pinyin tests which could cause the system to become unusable (keyboard hidden and no way to bring it back, or open and no way to access the test buttons).
Fixed an intermittent crashing bug on fill-in-the-blanks flashcard tests when no text was entered in one or more of the test fields.
Fixed a bug that prevented flashcard fill-in-the-blanks pinyin tests from correctly scoring fields that occur after a blank / skipped field.
Fixed a bug that prevented the web browser address bar from closing correctly / going to a new page correctly on iOS 5.
Fixed a bug that caused the Web Reader Live Mode popup bubble to fail to position itself correctly on iOS 5.
Fixed a bug that caused the document reader Bookmarks screens to refuse to dismiss correctly on iOS 5.
Fixed a bug that prevented Pleco from treating the new un-dockable iPad keyboard in iOS 5 as a normal keyboard for close / open events.
Fixed a bug that prevented the Web Reader from correctly copying text when tapping on the [>] button in Pasteboard mode on iOS 5.
Fixed a graphical glitch (mismatched background color) in the rendering of a few settings items (mainly the Registration ID header) on iOS 5.
OCR-related:
Added a new “motion detection” feature to the OCR system; this combines video and motion sensor input with to determine when an iPhone (or the text in front of it) is moving and automatically pause the OCR system / stop updating the character and definition display when it’s not. This is our attempt to deal with the “jitter” problems experienced by some users by keeping the text from changing once you’ve stopped moving your phone. You can choose to use output from the motion sensor plus camera together or only use output from one, can customize the threshold at which the system considers the device to be moving / stopped, and can have the system resume automatically when it detects motion or only resume after tapping the “resume” button. You’ll be asked if you want to enable this option the first time you open OCR; you can enable / disable it later in Settings / OCR / Live Video / Motion Detection / Enable.
Greatly improved support for recognizing text in still images, and thanks to this extended OCR support to iPads and 3G/4G iPod Touches. The new still image recognition system works in three different modes:
* Block Recognizer lets you select a large portion of an image and recognize all of the Chinese text in it at once. You can then bring up this text in the document reader, copy it to the pasteboard, or - possibly this entire update's coolest feature - simply tap on characters in the image to look them up just as in our regular document reader.
(if you’re wondering why it’s been 3 months since our last update, the above two features took up roughly 75% of that time)* Added the ability to correct mis-recognized OCR characters by tap-holding on them with the recognizer paused. Normally this will just pop up a list of alternate matches, but in the still image modes, if you’ve purchased our Fullscreen Handwriting Recognizer add-on it will also give you a handwriting input box with the mis-recognized character in the background so that you can enter the correct character simply by writing it.
Added the ability to select a different character in a long string of characters in live OCR by tapping on it when the recognizer is paused. Tap on the first character of the currently-selected word to shrink the selection length (useful for narrowing in on single characters).
Added an option to limit the speed at which the definition can change in live OCR “Lookup Words” mode. (Settings / OCR / Live Video / Mode-specific / Lookup Words / Recognizer Settings / Max defn update speed)
Added an option to automatically play audio after pointing to a word in live OCR in “Lookup Words” mode. (Settings / OCR / Live Video / Mode-specific / Lookup Words / Other Settings / Auto-play audio on lookups)
Added a “Copy results to search box” option for OCR which, combined with the “Take over Wild button” option, allows you copy a piece of text from the OCR system directly to the main dictionary search box - turn on both of those options, bring up OCR by tapping on the “OCR” button in the dictionary tab with search input open, select a piece of text, pause the recognizer, then exit and the recognized text will be copied into the search box. (Settings / OCR / Take over Wild button)
Added a “Text Unclear” popup which shows up below the live OCR recognition area when the system is unable to “lock on” to a word clearly.
Added an orientation selection button for live OCR.
Added options to shrink the buttons and definition in the OCR interface.
Added an option to pause live OCR by holding down a finger on the display.
Added “newline removal” options to the text-block-capturing OCR modes, letting you choose whether to preserve newlines, strip soft line breaks or strip all line breaks.
Added Pinyin display and still image support to the free demo version of OCR.
Other
Added a “Lyrics Reader” function in the document reader; this will let you browse through your device’s music collection and select a song to view its embedded lyrics (if any) while queuing it up in the built-in music player.
Added preliminary Google / Bing Translate support via tap-hold text selection, though this currently only works in the document reader and in dictionary entries. After enabling this option (Settings / General / Tap-hold Translator / Translation Source), you can tap-hold on a piece of text in Pleco to select it (even a whole sentence) and tap on the “Translate” button to pop up an online translation of it. Please note that this requires an internet connection and uses a small amount of bandwidth for each translation request.
Added an option (Settings / Reader / Popup Reader / Anchor at bottom) to make the definition “bubble” anchor itself to the bottom of the screen in the document reader instead of moving around.
Added the ability for items in dictionary search result lists to mix font sizes on the same line of text - separate font size settings for headword + Pinyin (e.g.) in Settings / Dictionary / Entry List (Chinese-English) will now be honored.
Added the ability to prevent the flashcard system from converting text in the Pinyin section of flashcards to Pinyin if it’s prefixed by a @ (useful when using Pleco with other romanization systems / other dialects / other languages / etc).
Added an “unknown flashcard” option to the document reader that works just like the option in OCR “Capture Flashcards” to let you create flashcards from new words encountered in the reader, and added a new “unknown flashcard handling” mode both to that and to OCR which creates a new user dictionary entry and links a flashcard to it rather than simply creating a custom flashcard - useful when documenting new words encountered while reading documents.
Added an option (Settings / General / Startup / Only if contains Chinese) to only paste in / search for the text in the pasteboard if it contains Chinese characters.
Added support for a new URL type (“plecolookup”) which can be used to launch Pleco from other apps; this does not yet actually insert / search for the text in the URL or support any other settings, but for some apps (e.g. Anki) that simply search for whatever’s currently in the pasteboard it should slightly streamline the process of searching for words in Pleco.
Added support in flashcard “Search Cards” for finding “force exclude” and “force include”d cards.
Completely reorganized OCR settings to make them cleaner.
Reorganized the main OCR screen to make it use two levels for still image capture.
Changed the default color of the OCR overlay to a slightly darker shade of green.
Added a prompt the first time handwriting / radical input is opened on iPad offering to configure them to display in fullscreen.
Improved the ability of the document reader to span multiple lines with text selections (helpful if a line is interrupted in the middle in an OCR transcript).
Added the current character to the top of the Character Info Chars “Compounds” tab.
Greatly improved the performance of the OCR “Sauvola Binarization” option.
Made the “Unknown Words” setting in Settings / OCR / Live Video / Mode-specific / Capture Flashcards / Other Settings apply to flashcards created by a button tap too, so with that option set to “Create Custom” you can easily create a custom flashcard from a newly-encountered word that isn’t in one of our dictionaries.
Improved support for bridging Chinese words broken up by newlines and spaces in the document reader.
Made text selection highlights more visible in Night Mode.
Increased the default text margins on iPad.
Added an error message when creating a flashcard category with an invalid name containing a slash “/”.
Inserted the current page title as the default name in the built-in web browser’s bookmark creation screen.
Added duplicates of the popup reader settings from Settings / General to Settings / Reader to make them easier to find (pending the full-on settings overhaul in 2.3).
Added an error message for (some) failed “Restore Purchases” commands.
Added an Optical Character Recognizer system as a paid add-on module, featuring an amazing “live” capture mode where you can point your iPhone 4 / 3GS’ camera at words to instantly look them up in the dictionary. It also supports capturing short phrases / blocks of text for the document reader, scanning in long lists of words for flashcards (with a barcode-reader like time delay and even a “beep” when it records the word, and an option to define a new custom entry when a word can’t be found in the dictionary)
Added full iOS-style tap-hold copy-and-paste support to dictionary entry / document reader text displays; this was actually incredibly complicated, we basically had to reimplement the entire thing ourselves, but it should now be possible to tap-hold and select arbitrary portions of dictionary entries to copy-and-paste them into other applications (or other parts of Pleco); there’s also a “Search For” button in the command popup along with the Copy button, so using that it’s now convenient to do cross-reference searches for English / Pinyin words along with characters.
Added an option (Settings/General/Popup Reader/Sticky dict selection) to make the dictionary selection in the popup reader / document reader “sticky,” so that the software will keep defaulting to the dictionary that you manually select until you switch it to another one (rather than always defaulting to the first dictionary in Manage Dicts). The selected dictionary will remain the default in the same tab even between Pleco launches, but is maintained separately in the Dict / Reader / Flash tabs so you can default to whichever dictionary you like in each.
Added Select / Cut / Copy / Paste commands to the search input field in HWR/Rad input mode
Added normal iPhone-style bouncing behavior to dictionary entry / document reader text displays, so you’ll no longer get a dead stop when you get to the top / bottom of a block of text.
Added support for live deletion of installed modules in “Add-ons”; you can now instantly deactivate or update a demo dictionary / stroke order diagrams / audio / etc, rather than having to exit and reopen Pleco or (on iOS 4) kill it in the background before the module would disappear.
Made updates downloaded in Add-ons load instantly instead of waiting for the software to be completely exited / reopened.
Added an option (Settings/General/Security/Permanently disable web) to permanently disable all of Pleco’s web browsing functions, useful for school administrators, users with young children, or anyone else who wishes to restrict web browsing on their iPhone. This can only be turned off by deleting and reinstalling Pleco (or by contacting Pleco support); if we get a lot of requests, we may also add a password-protected option to disable and re-enable web browsing, but this was much easier to implement and we got the impression that most of the people who want to block web browsing in Pleco are quite happy to block it permanently.
Enhanced our long search term breakdown feature by adding header rows in the search results list to separate results for a particular character / part of a search term.
Increased the maximum number of recent queries / entries to 1000 each.
Added the ability to delete individual items from recent queries / entries with a standard iPhone swipe-delete gesture.
Made the Pasteboard mode of the document reader accessible without purchasing the document reader add-on (as a sort-of demo version).
Added the ability to automatically detect that a device had changed / offer to query iTunes to restore purchases on startup, rather than simply reverting to a demo version
Added separate color settings for the document reader (so that it no longer simply uses the same settings as dictionary definitions).
Added options to change the colors of correct and incorrect strokes in the flashcard stroke order test, for the sake of color-blind users.* Streamlined the process of discovering / using demo versions of add-ons; there’s now a helpful “TAP FOR DEMO” in the header of each block of Add-ons in the Add-ons tab, and the second button in the add-on details screen is consistently reserved to either offer a trial version of the add-on or to explain how to go about trying it out elsewhere in the app (if a trial is available at all).
Eliminated the separate “Help” tab and made the “Reader” tab available all the time, relabeled “Read+Help” if the OCR module hasn’t been purchased or “Read+OCR” if it has (in which case that’s where the OCR module appears).
Added a new option for Pleco to save / return to the last major tab (Dict/Read/Flash) that it was in before it exited; it won’t actually open up the last document / resume your flashcard session, but it’ll put you a few button presses closer to doing that. (Settings/General/Startup/Restore last tab)
Added an option (now enabled by default on iPad) to keep the history button visible during search input. (Settings/Dictionary/Overall Interface/Basic Options/Keep history btn during input)
Added an option to display document reader text in a bold font (which actually looks a lot nicer on a Retina Display at least).
Added support for downloading / offline viewing of the instruction manual through the Add-ons tab.
Added an option for larger margins in the document reader (Settings/Reader/Larger margins) - these should be more precisely customizable in 2.3.
Made the document reader more tolerant of whitespace (spaces and newlines) between characters, useful in badly-formatted documents or in text copied out of web pages with a lot of extra newlines inserted in it.
Added a prompt to select a new card answer score after invoking the “Undo” command in flashcards.
Added a single-option Pleco panel to the built-in iPhone “Settings” app which, if turned on, resets all of Pleco’s settings to their default values, useful in the event that you change settings in such a way that Pleco starts crashing every time you launch it. (hopefully not possible, but it’s a sensible bit of protection against future bugs)
Automatically populated the new dictionary entry creation screen’s Headword sections with the current contents of the Input Field.
Made text in the current / highlighted entry in the Entry List appear in white with a blue background on iPad, instead of retaining its black color, and adopted that white-on-blue text selection pattern on iPhone as well.
Made dictionary search results containing multiple blocks of entries (for searches with lots of characters) automatically jump to the start of the bottom block of entries on iPad / in combined dict/list mode on iPhone, so that if you keep entering characters you’ll see the definition update to show the latest one.
Added educational discount prices to the Paid add-on file catalog screen (instead of only showing them on the product detail pages).
Added an Edit button to the document reader in pasteboard mode which (sensibly enough) edits the contents of the pasteboard, though this is not available in the demo version of the reader.
Made the Edit button in the document reader no longer a hidden / Experimental option needing to be enabled in Settings.
Added a Settings option (Settings/Flashcards/Test Interface/Back tab back immediately) to go back to the previous card immediately when tapping on the Back tab.
Added a Settings option (Settings/Flashcards/Test Interface/Prompt for new score on undo) to disable the prompt to select a new score after Undo’ing a previously-selected card score.
Added a Settings option (Settings/Flashcards/Test Interface/Prompt to continue rep-spaced) to disable the prompt to continue a repetition-spaced session after finishing the cards due for review that day.
Added a welcome message to the demo version of the handwriting input screen.
Added a link to demo dictionary entries which can be tapped on to instantly disable demo dictionaries, avoiding the need to delete them or to find the option that does this in Settings.
Added additional warning messages when attempting to purchase OCR, and made it appear in a separate “Not Compatible” section in Add-ons when not available on a particular device instead of disappearing altogether.
Added a Settings option for the optional dictionary entry exit button to clear input along with opening it
Reduced the application size of Pleco back under the 20 MB mark (allowing it to be downloaded from App Store over 3G), through a combination of minor changes:
* Separated out the less-common ("Rare") Char Info Unihan database fields from the more common ones, and made the less common ones a free add-on download, available through the "Free" section of the "Add-ons" tab.
Swapped the positions of the add-to-flash / audio buttons in the popup reader to make the position of the audio button more consistent.
Changed the Head / Pron labels for flashcard session field selections to Characters / Pinyin for clarity reasons.
Changed the order of buttons in the flashcard Back command bar so that “skip card” and “forward” no longer share the same space (and hence “forward”ing back to the current card you’ll be less likely to end up also skipping new cards)
Renamed the “Manual” tab to “Help” when it’s not integrated into the Reader tab
Renamed the file extension for copied-from-USB Pleco add-on databases to .plecopackage, to (hopefully) avoid confusion when people try to extract .zip files that actually are supposed to be copied over as-is
Expanded the tappable area for the dictionary switch button to make it harder to miss when tapping in that section of the screen; also did this for the add-to-flash and edit entry buttons.
Improved Unicode Extension-B character set support in flashcards + document reader.
Switched the font for document reader editing to the same font we use for Chinese text rendering elsewhere in Pleco; this will make English letters appear a bit odd (unfortunately, there’s no way for us to use the same font for those while also using the same Chinese font) but should make Chinese characters more consistent.
Added a helpful alert when trying to create an English-to-Chinese flashcard instead of just graying out the + button.
Included staff in the educational discount description message.
Fixed a bug which caused a toolbar to appear in the middle of the screen when using the popup reader function while in handwriting or radical input mode on iPad.
Fixed a bug which made it impossible to delete user-created dictionary databases on iOS 4.0.
Fixed a bug which could cause deleted databases to continue eating up memory on iOS 4.0.
Fixed a bug which prevented “Fixed” card selection from working correctly in flashcard tests.
Fixed a bug which could cause the control buttons in flashcards to be screwed up when resuming testing in a multiple-choice test after having previously backtracked to an earlier card.
Fixed a bug which prevented the user dictionary edit and add flashcard icons from rendering at high-resolution on the iPhone 4.
Fixed a crashing bug when exiting and reopening the application with an unzip / file installation operation in progress on iOS 4.0.
Fixed a rare crashing bug when entering a search query very rapidly at a certain precise interval between keystrokes, mainly a problem on iOS 4.0.
Fixed a bug that could cause the popup dictionary bubble to run off the screen in the Dict tab in landscape mode on iPad with input open.
Fixed a bug that could cause a crash when putting Pleco in the background while waiting for an add-on purchase to finish processing.
Fixed a bug that could cause crashes in the fullscreen handwriting recognizer when running it on a delay (or running a background task) and exiting the recognizer before the most recent stroke drawn had been successfully recognized.
Fixed a rare crashing bug when scrolling through lists of full-text search results.
Fixed a bug that caused the keyboard to stay visible (and never auto-hide) after duplicating a flashcard profile or scorefile on iOS 4.0.
Fixed a bug that could occasionally prevent results from user dictionaries from being returned correctly on all-character searches.
Fixed a bug that could cause text files in the document reader to appear garbled after changing their text encoding to “Not Set” via the file rename screen.
Fixed a bug that could cause the keyboard in the flashcard / user dictionary entry editor screen to be hidden when exiting one of the headword editor screens and then immediately opening the Pinyin or definition editor screen.
Fixed a bug that could cause the document reader “Live Mode” to fail to activate correctly on pages loaded after being redirected from another page (a common problem on Wikipedia among other places).
Moderately improved application startup performance by rearranging Pleco’s database files to consolidate header information at the front (reducing the number of disk reads required to open / initialize each file) and by loading on-demand several pieces of data that we’d previously loaded immediately on file open.
Added a “Working…” overlay while registration / purchase requests are in process.
Optimized the file download status update system to make the Add-ons tab scroll / respond a lot faster while files are downloading.
Sped up the opening of the handwriting input dialog in landscape mode or with a larger-than-default character selection bar in portrait mode.* Expanded the tappable area of the search input field at the top of the dictionary screen; now, tapping anywhere in that toolbar that the system doesn’t interpret as being part of a button will open up input.
Also slightly expanded the tappable area of the dictionary switch button, so it’ll be more difficult to accidentally tap the screen above or below it.
Moderately improved font rendering performance by caching more information about character widths.
Made progress / activity overlays take over the entire screen and prevent other interaction until they finish what they’re doing.
Tweaked the stroke order diagrams screen to render a bit more smoothly, particularly with complicated character or at high speeds; bigger improvements in this should be forthcoming in a future update when we transition stroke order diagrams to OpenGL.
Allowed opening of document files / the document reader from any file browser screen, even those outside of the Reader tab, if the document reader module has been purchased.
Changed the “0.0 MB” size label for the handwriting / document reader modules back to “(built-in)”, since 0.0 MB seems to have caused even more confusion than “built-in” did.
Made the momentary “word added” messages take up the entire screen (with a translucent overlay)
Resized the magnified character view to accommodate an onscreen keyboard when the definition is visible during a search.
Enabled Night Mode in the document reader text editor
Revised the PLC dictionary to merge all single-character entries in which the simplified / traditional versions and Pinyin match (previously broken up into multiple entries with superscript numbers after them), so that you’ll no longer end up with useless definitions (like “shield” for gan1) in single-character flashcard imports. Also stopped including part-of-speech sections of definitions in full-text E-C searches, so that it’ll no longer be impossible to get useful results for a word like “medicine.”
Tweaked the file download system to allow certain dictionaries (mainly intended for ABC) to cause the dictionary priority list to automatically be rebuilt when they’re downloaded (only initially, not on an update); this is so that users who don’t know how to find Manage Dicts can still have the largest available dictionary show up by default in popup definitions / flashcard imports / etc.
Made editable text fields on configuration screens automatically scroll into view when tapping on them to start editing.
Changed the “Edit” button on the Manage Dicts screen to “Reorder” to better represent what it does.
Slightly sped up the drawing of text in scrollable fields by turning their backgrounds opaque when possible.
Added the ability for the “Search for headword” command (much like its Copy to Input predecessor on Palm/WM), if activated on the main screen with no text selected, to check to see if the current search term already matches the current headword and, if so, replace it with the current headword’s Pinyin.
Made the “Word Lists” feature accessible even if the document reader hasn’t been purchased (though the resulting wordlist files can’t actually be viewed in that case, they can only be downloaded or emailed).
Set file names in the file browser / file picker to reduce their font size to fit the available screen width for long names.
Tweaked the names of a few Settings to make them a bit more sensible / less abbreviated.
Finally fixed (we think) a bug that could sometimes cause Pleco to become very slow after it had been in use for a while; the bug involved a combination of some really-difficult-to-find memory leaks and a bit of code relating to text insertion points.
Fixed a bug that could cause complicated headwords in the ABC dictionary (i.e. headwords with lots of //es and/or ()s in them) to become garbled in traditional-character mode.
Fixed a bug that caused the document reader to default to the first dictionary in Manage Dicts even if that dictionary happened to be a demo version.
Fixed a few small memory leaks / disappearing view problems in low-memory situations.
Fixed a bug that could cause crashes when scrolling through a list of dictionary entries at the precise moment that a full-text search was in the process of being performed.
Fixed a bug that could cause a freeze / infinite loop when displaying a dictionary entry in a list of full-text search results if the entry contains a word that’s too long to fit in the width of an entire line.
Fixed a bug that could cause crashes when canceling a download from the download details screen while it was in the process of “installing.”
Fixed a bug that prevented ABC hyperlinks with superscript numbers greater than 32 (yes, there are a few pronunciations that common - a whopping 58 characters are pronounced “yi4”) from working correctly.
Fixed a bug that caused activity / progress overlays to become distorted when the screen is rotated.
Fixed a bug that in rare cases could cause dictionary entry list taps to be mis-directed to a different item than the one tapped on.
Fixed a bug that could cause crashes when exiting a handwriting / radical input screen while holding down one of the character choices in it to display a popup.
Fixed a bug that could screw up the background color / text positioning of items in the file browser view when in Edit mode.
Fixed a rare crashing bug when exiting the handwriting recognizer screen.
Fixed a bug that made some dictionary icon characters a bit fuzzy.
Fixed a bug that could cause .zip files on some web servers to fail to automatically download in Pleco’s built-in web browser (due to their having unknown MIME types).
Fixed a bug that could cause extra Recent Queries entries to be recorded for handwriting recognizer characters in the process of being drawn in transparent mode.
Fixed a bug that could cause crashes when exiting the dictionary details view on the Manage Dicts screen.
Fixed a bug in the Settings selection list for the maximum # of characters in Live Mode, which had caused some of the larger settings to actually set a smaller-than-selected limit.
Fixed a bug that prevented the Full button from triggering a new search when in transparent or iPad handwriting or radical mode
Fixed a bug that prevented the undo button in handwriting input from reverting to a backspace button when the character was fully undone.
Fixed a bug that prevented some XML flashcard lists from downloading correctly in the built-in web browser.
Fixed a bug that prevented “word added” popups from appearing with the embedded dictionary definition on the main screen set to be smaller than normal.
Fixed a bug that caused crashes whenever viewing a block of text in which the last character is a character return (e.g. on custom flashcards)
Fixed a bug that could cause crashes when exiting handwriting input a precise amount of time after having just drawn a stroke
Fixed a bug that caused a few characters (e.g. Ju4 “opera”) to fail to render correctly in stroke order diagrams; this fix requires a stroke order database update, however. (through the “Updates” tab in Add-ons)
Fixed a bug that caused the bottoms of ’g’s to be cut off in the folder name screen
Fixed a bug that could cause crashes when using the Back command to jump to a no-longer-available dictionary entry
Fixed a rare crash when uploading files to the built-in web server.
Fixed a bug in the font size list in Settings that prevented the 84 and 96 font sizes from applying correctly (the font would still be 72), and added size–108 and size–120 options for the sake of iPad users.
Added relevance sorting to fulltext English-to-Chinese searches; this can be disabled under Settings. Words are prioritized by whether they appear as the only word (or starting word) in a particular section of a dictionary definition, and words in definitions are prioritized over those in example sentences in some dictionaries. We’ve managed to do this in such a way that it has literally no impact on search speed, though it does require you to update your dictionary databases (through the “Updates” tab in Add-ons).
Added an option to include an audio playback button in the popup reader toolbar.
Added an option to include a clipboard Copy button in the popup reader toolbar; we haven’t worked out a good way to do arbitrary text selection yet (the normal iPhone method interferes with tapping on words to look them up), but this will at least let you clip out a particularly-useful Chinese word which you can then insert into a text message / email / etc.
Added preliminary support for rendering rare and Unicode Extension B characters in dictionary entries; with a database update this should now make every single character in the ABC dictionary render correctly. This requires the Stroke Order feature to be purchased / installed, however, since it relies on data in that database to generate its character outlines.
Added the ability to render rare components in Chars / Components in Char Info; most of them can also be searched for, though they generally don’t have any information available in Details.
Added a background grid option for stroke order diagrams, as already exists for the handwriting recognizer.
Added a command to reset Pleco’s color schemes to defaults without resetting other Settings.
Added a Pack button to the document reader file browser, allowing you to wrap up a bunch of files / folders in a Zip archive to make it easier to download / email. (this is mostly in anticipation of our forthcoming flashcard-equipped version, where Zip compression will be important for facilitating fast / easy backups)
Added an option to disable the placeholder “pulike” text that appears in the search input field.
Added an option to restore the previous contents of the search input field when exiting / reopening the software.
Enlarged the tappable area of the popup reader dictionary switch / entry scroll buttons to make it harder to exit by accident, and slightly improved the speed with which it first comes up when tapped.
Added the ability for the popup reader to detect that it’s pointing at a multi-line word / phrase selection and move itself accordingly so that it doesn’t cover up any selected text.
Greatly improved the reliability of file downloads in the document reader web browser, so that text and other files which could sometimes be opened up in the web browser should now consistently generate a save prompt.
Improved the system for choosing single-character dictionary entries in the popup reader, so that it’s now more likely to pick the one with the most common pronunciation.
Added support for U8 / GB / B5 / UNI file extensions to the document reader, with the first three automatically setting their text encodings based on those extensions.
Added the ability to paste in text in the search input field even in HWR / Rad mode; just tap-hold on it and release and an Apple-style paste button will appear.
Added the ability for the Wild button to respect the current insertion point position even when in Key input mode, rather than always inserting the wildcard at the end of the search input.
Added the ability to remember / restore the last selected history mode (Entries or Searches).
Color-scheme-enabled the Char Info Details / Strokes tabs, so cells in them will now appear colored just like those in Chars / Words, and added options to tint the background of the Char Info Details / Strokes tabs.
Changed the default tone colors to make the red / green a bit darker and more readable.
Added the current character to the top of the “Components” section of “Chars” in Char Info.
Swapped the top / bottom parts of the Manage Dicts dictionary details screen, so the switches to enable / disable search / toolbar / etc access now appear on top.
Made dictionary names still tappable to enter the dictionary details screen when Manage Dicts is in Editing mode.
Improved the clarity / attractiveness of Pleco’s version of the Apple text selection loupe for moving the cursor around in HWR / Rad input fields.
Added the ability for the transparent-background handwriting recognizer to automatically re-enable when the search input bar is initially opened to it.
Got rid of the “(built-in)” text for the document reader / handwriting recognizer add-ons, since it seemed to be causing a lot of confusion (the “built-in” actually just refers to the fact that there’s no download required, not that the add-ons are already purchased / activated).
Added a better error message in the document reader file browser when moving files to a location where another file with the same name already exists.
Eliminated the scroll buttons from the document reader screen when in text editing mode.
Added the operating system name to the tech support email form, and both its name and version to the information we send our server for registrations, in anticipation of future major iPhone OS updates.
Fixed an intermittent bug that could cause Char Info Details to be blank / missing when certain add-on dictionaries were installed.
Fixed a longstanding iTunes bug which can cause prices in some regions (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, etc) to show up with Euro symbols when they’re actually denominated in US dollars. This has to be configured manually in our download file catalog, though, so we may not have perfectly fixed this for all regions yet. (there’s no 100% fix, sadly, since Apple’s servers are telling our software the prices are in Euros even when they’re not)
Fixed cookie support in the document reader web browser in Live Mode.
Fixed a bug that caused the file dates on extracted zip files to be completely incorrect.
Fixed a bug that could cause occasional crashes when searching or scrolling through the 21st Century dictionary.
Fixed a bug which caused the popup reader “search” command (magnifying glass) to fail to work correctly when returning to the main dictionary screen while it’s in history mode.
Fixed a bug that could occasionally prevent the popup reader bubble from appearing correctly in the document reader
Fixed a crashing bug when exiting the document reader.
Fixed a bug that would cause a save prompt to come up even after no text had changed in the document reader text editor, if you’d previously stopped editing and declined to save the updated file.
Fixed a rare bug that could cause web browser downloads to fail to save correctly if you’d never opened the Document Files section of the reader screen before.
Added the ability for fulltext E-C searches to search for partial words, matching on the first word in its database that begins with the search text entered, though this is currently only enabled when no dedicated E-C dictionaries are installed.
Added the ability to listen to audio for single-syllable entries in the demo version (though this too requires a data file update through Add-ons).
Added the ability to purchase Bundles even when a few of the items in them have already been separately purchased.
Added an option in Settings for a simpler (boxy corners / no shadow) popup definition bubble, which should render a bit faster.
Added a “Clear All” button to the document reader web browser history screen.
Added an extra two pixels to E-C Entry List items, which were a little too tightly packed and overwriting the inter-cell lines.
Disabled the List Mode button when the dictionary entry history is visible.
Disabled Radical input character-set checking by default, though it can be re-enabled through Settings; with it disabled, tapping on a simplified-specific radical will show both simplified and traditional characters containing that radical.
Disabled reader “auto-clip on copy” by default.
Fixed a serious bug which caused Zhuyin / BoPoMoFo syllables to be incorrectly mapped to their Pinyin equivalents, making Zhuyin display / input useless.
Fixed a bug that prevented headword display settings (dashes / brackets) from applying to Entry List items.
Fixed a bug which made full-text English-to-Chinese searches switch to to Chinese-to-English mode even when the text entered was still a valid English word (or the start of one).
Fixed a bug in the document reader text editor which, when the “auto-clip on copy” option was enabled, would cause the clipboard reader screen to come up every time you entered a handwritten character.
Fixed a bug that could cause erroneous error messages to come up when changing pages in mid-load in the instruction manual.
Fixed a bug in full-text E-C result highlighting which could prevent words appearing twice in a row from both being highlighted.
Fixed a bug that prevented multi-line text selections from being properly cleared when deselected.
Fixed a crashing bug related to exiting the document reader web browser, or setting it to load the most recently-viewed page on open.
Fixed several display glitches in the ABC English-Chinese dictionary (though this requires a data file update through the “Updates” tab in Add-ons)
Fixed a few bugs in “Chars Only” language auto-detect mode.
Fixed a bug in the About screen that could cause a very long list of copyrights to be truncated.
Fixed a bug that allowed document reader web browser history and regular bookmarks to be intermingled (regular bookmarks being moved to history, e.g.).
Fixed a few small memory leaks in some infrequently-used screens.
Fixed a bug which caused scrolling of items in the reader file browser to be unusually slow.
Fixed a bug which could sometimes prevent the preview image that comes up when tap-holding on a handwriting / radical result from rendering correctly.
Fixed a bug in settings that could prevent the “Alpha” background option from being made available when alpha handwriting input is enabled.
First release of Pleco on iPhone OS.
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