Pleco for Android Instruction Manual : Version History

Version History

2.4.18

Fixed a crashing bug on some Sony Xperia devices. (one that doesn't seem to be attributable to anything we did in 2.4.17 but that nonetheless has started happening a lot more frequently lately)

2.4.17

Fixed a nasty intermittent OCR crashing bug on some very new devices running (mostly) Android 4.4.
Fixed a bug that could cause the keyboard to appear at inappropriate times and take up half of the handwriting area on Android 4.4.
Fixed a nasty OCR crash-on-startup bug on some non-Google-standard Android distributions like certain versions of MIUI.
Fixed several other assorted crashing bugs.
Fixed a bug that prevented character breakdowns in the search box from working correctly when they contained A-Z letters.
Fixed a bug that made it impossible to clear OCR history in the History screen.
Fixed a bug that prevented the popup reader bubble from dismissing correctly when the clipboard was updated.
Fixed a bug that could make the document reader fail to reliably detect URLs in some cases

2.4.14

Fixed a bug that could prevent Copy and Move operations in Organize Cards from executing completely in some circumstances.

2.4.13

Rolled back to the Android 4.2 API version to fix a bug that caused popup reader text to fail to word wrap correctly.
Fixed a rare flashcard audio crashing bug.

2.4.12

Fixed a crash when entering certain full-text search terms that were very late in the alphabet and that potentially wrapped around to the end of the alphabet.
Fixed a bug that could cause the strokes in the handwriting input box to disappear but the recognizer to believe they were still around, causing weird / mismatched results when returning from the background.
Fixed (we think) a crash on startup on certain HTC devices with buggy firmware (firmware which did not correctly handle a particular EditText attribute).
Fixed a crash on startup with a corrupted preferences file. (this crash discovery made possible by Android 4.3's newly added ability to collect crash reports from native code, something that should greatly help us in continuing to improve Pleco's stability going forward)
Fixed a crash in Manage Dicts when new dictionaries were downloading in the background.
Fixed a crash when returning to the history screen after adding some items outside of it, or when a background OCR or flashcard import task caused a list to grow longer while in the middle of viewing history.
Fixed a bug that caused flashcards to be moved / copied in an incorrect order.
Fixed a couple of rare crashes mostly related to long-running background tasks.

2.4.11

Made the software menu button optional (Settings / General) on devices that do have hardware menu buttons.
Fixed a bug that prevented some types of newline from being stripped out of custom dictionary entries correctly in search results.
Fixed a bug that could cause flashcard sessions that had already been completed to reappear as saved sessions.
Rolled back the flashcard status icon default change since it was causing slowdowns on a few devices.

2.4.10

Started using Google Play's servers for data file downloads of our main app too, after encountering very few problems with this in our "CN" version.
Made the software menu button visible at the top right corner of the screen on all Android 4.x devices, not just those without hardware menu buttons.
Made the audio number-of-plays option available in flashcards for users who've only purchased TTS or are only using the free demo audio.
Made a few interface options available to demo version flashcard users, since left-handed people shouldn't be forced to buy our flashcard add-on just to have a left-handed-friendly interface.
Added an actual option to disable OCR "compatibility mode."
Improved English text-to-speech compatibility to work with a wider range of devices.
Stripped newlines out of user dictionary entries in the results list.
Enabled the "show flash status" option by default for new users.
Added a helpful alert when attempting to share a text file with the demo version document reader.
Made the Registration ID prompt no longer disappear / get rid of your entered text on a connection failure (so you can turn on WiFi or whatever without having to enter your ID again).
Made the blank screen on startup appear black instead of white for the sake of Night Mode users.
Made the Night Mode flashcard drawing stroke color light-gray instead of white, so that it'll contrast slightly with the buttons behind it.
Made the option to disable the "entry bar" apply even in merged searches.
Added a startup alert for SwiftKey users advising them to choose a different keyboard if they experience problems with handwriting input.
Fixed glitchy / incomplete display of a few characters in stroke order diagrams (make sure to update your stroke order database via the Add-ons "Updates" tab).
Fixed an issue that could cause document reader and flashcard test sessions to be reset in some cases after rotating your device while it's asleep.
Fixed an issue that could cause the dictionary switch button to become inaccessible (touch area taken over by the right arrow button) in the popup reader.
Fixed a bug that could cause sentence searches ending with a space to fail to be parsed / broken down correctly.
Fixed a bug that prevented search results from updating correctly after adding an entry to a user dictionary.
Fixed a bug that could cause filters in Search Cards to remain active even after you'd disabled them in the interface.
Fixed a bug that caused flashcard sessions to start putting up "too many audio plays" errors one play too soon.
Fixed a bug that made it impossible to create a dictionary launcher shortcut on devices running MIUI.
Added an option for software rendering for the Popup Reader, for the sake of users with extremely high-resolution tablets that have buggy graphics drivers like the Onda V972.
Fixed a bug that could obliterate a flashcard database if you attempted to "restore" it after having already copied it to the Pleco database storage directory.
Fixed a bug that made a few user dictionary import screens say "cards" instead of "entries."
Fixed a bug that made the Quick Input Bar show up in a few places even if disabled in settings.
Fixed a bug that could prevent some character components like the top left corner of 想 from pulling up corresponding entries in the Words tab.
Fixed a bug that could cause user dictionaries to be inaccessible on restart if the database files they were installed from used the wrong file extension.
Added a startup alert in the event of a corrupted library file (surprisingly common problem with Google Play downloads) advising users to reinstall Pleco.
Dozen or so other fixes for various rare crashes.

2.4.9

Fixed a bug that could cause search results to be incorrectly prioritized for certain E-C fulltext searches.
Added a tap-hold menu for the speech recognition button to let you instantly switch between English, Mandarin, and Cantonese input.
Fixed a bug that made the background of the bottom toolbar in Add-ons remain blank instead of looking like a toolbar.
Made still image OCR exit gracefully from a particular low-memory situation in which it would previously just crash without explanation.

2.4.8

Restructured the startup file downloader to be more resilient to errors and less likely to freeze up on corrupted files.
Made the startup file downloader display a progress bar when unpacking files that it didn't have to download first.
Fixed a bug that could cause temporary files from interrupted downloads to be left behind in some cases.
Fixed a bug that could cause flashcards from demo dictionaries to be totally blank instead of merely missing their definitions.
Fixed a bug that caused the flashcard launcher to no longer automatically resume flashcard sessions as it had done previously.

2.4.7

CN-version-only update to fix a bug that could cause Pleco's data files to be repeatedly re-downloaded from Google Play.

2.4.6

New Features / Design Changes

Made the Settings and Add-ons tasks no longer appear in the Android task history by default, the Install task never appear in the task history at all, and the other four tasks normally show but be hide-able via an option in Settings / General / Task Management. (also an option there to bring back Settings and Add-ons in history)
Added experimental support for using Google Play instead of our own server for downloads, but currently only in the CN version.
Made the Quick Input Bar remain visible on tablets even if the definition is embedded in the main screen.
Added a helpful alert offering to make the handwriting / radical input screens fullscreen (as they no longer are by default) the first time you access them on a tablet.
Added a link to Manage Dictionaries from the main screen in Settings (but we're leaving a copy behind in its old location in Dictionary for at least a release or two)
Added a settings option for Cantonese voice recognition along with Mandarin and English.
Added a settings option to automatically play audio when advancing through a document with the popup reader arrow buttons, alongside the existing option to play it when tapping on a word.
Switched to a newer file open / save box system that should work a bit more reliably.
Added support for Amazon's in-app purchase system in preparation for (probably) listing Pleco in their store once we've established that this new release is reasonably bug-free.
Added a warning message in Manage Dicts when tapping on a user dictionary in a copy of Pleco without the paid flashcard add-on (required to access user dictionaries).
Made the Copy / Share / etc commands in OCR in crosshairs mode only copy the highlighted text.
Added a startup alert when using user dictionaries in an outdated (first few releases of Pleco 2.0 on Palm and Windows Mobile) format.
Made the popup reader no longer show results from demo dictionaries.
Made Lulu TTS play traditional character text much more reliably.
Made Hui TTS use the Pinyin in custom dictionary entries even if it doesn't match how it thinks the characters should be read.
Made both TTSes read ~ characters in example sentences correctly (as the original word).
Sped up TTS playback by not checking for the presence of a TTS system every time audio is played if both systems aren't installed.
Added a check to prevent accidental double-tapping of the TTS play button in example sentences.
Revised the placeholder text in the document reader to no longer allude to the benefits of the paid reader add-on if you've already purchased it.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug that could cause E-C user dictionaries to only show a single matching result even with multiple results available.
Fixed a crashing bug when searching E-C user dictionaries that contain entries with extremely long headwords.
Fixed a bug that could cause flashcard sessions to fail to show some cards if TTS was installed.
Fixed a bug that caused the document reader to fail to recognize words that were broken up by spaces.
Fixed a bug that could cause Pleco to prematurely switch out of a dictionary that was switched to via a tap-hold menu selection.
Fixed a bug that could make it impossible to advance to the next flashcard if "undo"ing a fill-in-the-blanks card after it was marked correct/incorrect but before advancing to the next card.
Fixed a bug that could cause English flashcard sessions to fail if dictionary remapping was enabled with a series of Chinese dictionaries.
Fixed a rare crash when starting / resuming a flashcard session.
Fixed a bug that prevented the popup menu flashcard creation / deletion commands from working correctly in the main dictionary search screen.
Fixed a bug that prevented custom flashcard creation screens launched from the reader / OCR from reflecting your default category selection.
Fixed a bug that could cause text copied out of the document reader to not reflect your selection (but be taken from somewhere else in the document).
Fixed a crash on exiting the dictionary definition screen after listening to English audio.
Fixed a bug that could cause the handwriting box to only occupy part of the screen even when it was configured to be full-screen when the radical box was configured to be partial-screen.
Fixed a bug that prevented the flashcard system from switching back into fill-in-the-blanks character input mode when advancing to a fill-in-the-blanks character card from a Pinyin one with the practice drawing box open.
Fixed a crash on beginning a flashcard session with no cards found.
Fixed a couple of rare crashes in flashcard settings.
Fixed a bug that could cause "export cards" progress updates to skip / freeze up for hundreds of cards.
Fixed glitchy line rendering in the flashcard handwriting overlay on some devices.
Fixed a bug that prevented the font size from being consistently customizable in the text file reader.
Fixed a few more rare OCR crashes.
Fixed a rare crashing bug when launching the document reader.
Fixed an obscure crash when entering characters in an empty search box.
Fixed a bug that prevented the New Cat button from working in Search Cards results.

2.4.5

Fixed a bug in OCR that could prevent search results from appearing at all in some instances.
Fixed a couple of rare crashes.
Caused the "switch language" button to respect your current setting for changing the search dictionary on a new search.

2.4.4

Fixed a bug that could cause the new launcher app startup alert to keep appearing on every startup.
Fixed a bug that could prevent the new "legacy empty dict switching" feature from triggering correctly on startup.

2.4.3

New Features / Design Changes

Made wildcard and full-text searches in user dictionaries behave more closely to those in non-user ones, enforcing stricter matching with the former (no more partially-completed matches) and allowing prefix matching in the latter (so typing "dictionar" will get you to "dictionary")
Added a startup alert to inform users of the change from launcher apps to shortcuts and offer to create shortcuts to replace those launcher apps.
Made merged multi-dict search results bury entries from demo dictionaries if a non-demo dictionary is available, even if they're not set to be hidden altogether.
Added a "legacy empty dict switching" option in Settings / Dictionary / Search Settings / Result display to restore the old behavior (present in Pleco since 2004 or so) where switching dictionaries with the search field empty would take you to the first entry in the search results from the last time you searched that dictionary.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug that prevented the generation of Pleco shortcuts from third-party application / task launchers.
Fixed an issue on Android 3.0 and 3.1 (but not 3.2) that caused the interface to be grayed-out and unusable.
Fixed an issue on Android 3.2 that could cause long document files in the document reader to remain blank.
Fixed a bug that prevented switching from a merged search to individual dictionaries when the results are a multi-part character breakdown.
Fixed an intermittent crash when backgrounding a flashcard session.
Fixed an embarrassingly frequent crashing bug in full-text searches.
Fixed a crashing bug when viewing certain full-text search results.
Fixed a bug that prevented the menu button from appearing correctly in the free-version clipboard reader.
Fixed a crashing bug when interrupting some audio playback.
Fixed a crashing bug when attempting to advance through an empty stroke order diagram box.
Fixed a crashing bug when rearranging lists of flashcard categories.
Fixed a crashing bug in full-text searches of demo dictionaries.
Fixed a crashing bug when opening multiple instances of the main dictionary search screen (only possible in certain rare circumstances).
Fixed a bug that caused "buy" buttons to appear instead of download buttons when viewing not-yet-purchased dictionaries in the "Updates" tab in Add-ons.
Fixed a crashing bug when returning to Add-ons after Pleco had been exited for long enough to be unloaded from memory (though only if you had some not-yet-updated basic data files to download).
Fixed a rare bug that could prevent partially completed full-text searches for some words with different American/British spelling from picking the earliest matching word.
Fixed a bug that prevented flashcard duplicate checking from treating a word as "in category" if multiple duplicate cards existed for the word and not all of them were in that category.
Fixed a bug that prevented dictionary switching during flashcard tests if the "remap" feature was enabled.
Fixed a bug that could produce a truncated or gibberish definition when switching dictionaries with the tap-hold popup menu while viewing history.
Fixed a rare crashing bug when accessing the options menu in a couple of screens.

2.4.2

Fixed a bug that could cause crashes on some merged searches involving user dictionary entries.
Fixed a bug that caused demo version dictionaries to continue to show up in merged search results even after enabling the option to hide them.
Fixed a bug that prevented the reader text selection from being extended to cover alphabetical text.
Fixed a bug that caused the TTS system to ignore / skip over spaces.
Fixed a bug that could cause garbage characters to be copied to the search field when tapping on the search button in the popup reader toolbar.
Fixed a bug that caused weird behavior in flashcard sessions after deleting a card in Card Info, especially if in the middle of backtracking.
Fixed (we hope) a bug that could cause flashcard list items being drag-reordered to show incorrect / outdated info.
Fixed a bug that caused Organize Cards card lists set to match the dictionary list display settings to include some useless extra padding space at the bottom of each item.
Fixed a rare crashing bug when exporting flashcards from a slightly corrupted flashcard database.
Shaved 150K or so off of the installation size by updating to a newer version of the Android developer kit.

2.4.1

New Features / Design Changes

Redesigned single-character searches so that they will now pay attention to your simplified/traditional character setting and sort by character frequency in your chosen character set - traditional users will no longer have to put up with 几 as the first result for "ji," or with 歷 and 曆 being needlessly grouped together even with 曆 being significantly less common and unrelated to 歷.
Fixed an issue that could cause alternate character variants that had been merged into a search result to not be visible in the results, so that Pinyin searches for a particular character might not turn up any entries even if the dictionaries do cover that character.
Made single character Pinyin searches always treat every independent character in the current character set as a separate result, again to aid in finding a particular character from a long result list (and to avoid having a ridiculous case like "hui2" give you a single entry with nine different /-separated characters).
Separated the speed settings for the Lulu and Hui TTS engines.
Fixed the rendering of very complicated variants so that if you have a word with multiple variants in both simplified and traditional, cases where more than one variant in one character set maps to a single character in the other will be separated with ;s instead of /s (so that you can tell which character goes with which).

Bug Fixes

Fixed a serious bug with full-text searches that could sometimes bring up blank / irrelevant results (or even cause crashes).
Fixed several major memory leaks that could cause Pleco's performance to significantly degrade over time.
Greatly reduced the memory requirements of long search result lists, which should help with performance on some devices.
Sped up searches on some devices with very slow memory allocators by reducing the number of allocations needed to grow the result list.
Eliminated the option to configure the merge character set separately from the general traditional / simplified option, since it was proving too complicated to juggle conflicting settings for those, and since with multi-character entries we've opted to only merge on simplified (owing to the great variation in traditional versions of words among our mostly-Mainland-developed dictionaries, and the fact that there are only maybe half a dozen cases of different traditional words being converged to the same simplified one and that we already have another system for dealing with those).
Fixed a couple of rare seemingly-random crashes which we turned up using some more advanced (iOS-only - good thing we're developing on both platforms) memory error finding tools.
Removed the superfluous / confusing superscripts from some merged search results.
Fixed a bug in HanDeDict that caused umlauts in definitions to be turned into 'v's, and more minor bugs in several other dictionaries (see the Updates tab).
Fixed a bug that could cause OCR history entries to show up as "invalid," could cause OCR history views to crash, and could prevent changes to the OCR history from saving correctly.
Added an alert on startup for users running extremely outdated (to the point of causing very slow searches) dictionaries.
Started using the built-in font instead of our fallback Song font to display Unicode Extension A characters - if your system starts displaying lots of characters as boxes in this update, you can download Google's Droid Sans Fallback Full font with support for those characters from this page (click on "Raw" at the top right corner of the file box) and install it with the appropriate option in Settings / General.
Tweaked the merged dictionary icons slightly so that a full-text search of dictionaries in the same language (i.e. an English search of English-Chinese or a Chinese search of Chinese-English dictionaries) will show up with an inverted icon, so that you can easily differentiate these from regular searches.
Fixed a bug that required you to download the TTS add-ons before you could play their audio samples.
Applied our code for working around HTC / Sony Ericsson phones' keyboards refusing to acknowledge the standard Android "no suggestions" flag to flashcard fill-in-the-blanks tests that were set to use the system IME, as we had already done for the dictionary search field.
Fixed a bug that could cause flashcard definition text to appear cut off in the background of stroke order tests.

2.4.0

General

Switched to the new Holo theme on Android 4.0 devices (and it looks pretty darn cool), and switched from halloween orange to clean Android blue even on Android 2.x devices.
Also on Android 4.0, optimized every single screen (we think) for day and night mode. (this was not possible on older devices because they didn't support light-themed settings screens)
Switched to the new menu-button-at-the-top-right-corner-of-the-screen UI on devices without hardware menu buttons. (owners of buggy HTC devices without hardware or software menu buttons, rejoice!)
Totally restructured the way we handle different "sections" of Pleco in a way that more closely resembles the iPhone version: each of the 6 major sections of the app (dictionary, OCR, document reader, flashcards, add-ons, settings) is now an independent "task" with its own state, and the menu in *every single screen* will let you switch between them. (onscreen menu on Android 3.x/4.x, menu button on 2.x) Each section will also show up independently in your "recent tasks" list, so if you're more accustomed to using that to switch between tasks, or would like to jump back to a particular recently-used section of Pleco from where you were before, that should now be possible too. Please let us know what you think of all of this, and let us know if you encounter any weird section-switching behavior / any commands switching you to a different section than they're supposed to / any menus that include an option to switch to the section you're already in / etc.
In conjunction with this, added a title bar to a lot of settings screens that didn't have one before, both to keep the menu button location consistent and to help you figure out where you are in the many levels of Settings / Organize Cards / etc.
Enabled hardware acceleration on supported Android 4.0 devices.
Added an experimental text-to-speech add-on with two different voices - "Hui" and "Lulu," each available for $4.95 in "Add-ons." These make audio for custom cards that aren't in our "extended" database sound much better, particularly if they represent phrases or sentences, and also add the ability to listen to audio for entire sentences / paragraphs in the document reader and the ability to hear audio for any dictionary example sentence by tapping on an extra audio button next to it.
Greatly improved the interruptibility of audio playback, so in general the audio you're currently playing should stop almost immediately once new audio starts playing.
Eliminated our old launcher apps after we were accused by a competitor of spamming Google Play with them, and replaced them with an option in Settings / General to install shortcut icons that accomplish pretty much the same thing.
Changed our app's startup mode so that it should now return you to your last location when you launch it from a program launcher icon; if you preferred things the old way, one of the new launcher icons mentioned above lets you always return to the main dictionary search screen.
Added an "invert back button" option (Settings / General / Startup) to reverse the current back button behavior so that now it will open the keyboard if it's closed / exit the app if the keyboard is open, as opposed to the default behavior of closing it if it's open / exiting the app if it's closed.
Added support for pronouncing English words through Android's built-in speech synthesizer on compatible devices.
Updated app icon.
Disabled our Android 4.1 crashing bug workaround (which causes a lot of annoying superflous extra spaces) on devices running Android 4.1.2 or later, since the relevant Android bug appears to have been fixed in that update.
Moved the "example headword color" option to the General color scheme preferences.
Buffered add-on unpack file writing for slightly faster performance.
Made the bundle file download startup screen keep bugging you if your files are out of date until you explicitly tell it not to (with a don't ask again button) or update them.
Added support for the automatic update checker to also check for / notify you of / offer to download updates to the app itself if you didn't download it from Google Play (as with this beta).
Added a "copy ID to clipboard" button in Manage Registration and a corresponding button in the ID alert that comes up after a free HWR registration.
Added an option in Settings / Dictionary / Search Settings / Result Display to clear the search field immediately bring up the Browse / History / etc screen, since many people seem to feel that this is far more useful than seeing their previous search results - this will be off by default for now, though.
Made Settings refresh properly after a "reset all settings to defaults."
Made the "update bundle files" option automatically kill and reopen Pleco so you don't have to fiddle around with the task manager for it.
Improved memory handling for formatted text to reduce garbage collection lag / speed up performance a bit on older devices.

Dictionary UI

Added experimental, display-only support for Cantonese to the PLC dictionary; you can turn this on in Settings / General. Searching is not supported yet (you can use a free Cantonese IME for that), nor is there an option to display in any system other than Jyutping, nor is there any Cantonese audio or any support for Cantonese in flashcards / user dictionary entries, nor is there a dedicated dictionary of Cantonese-specific vocabulary; all of these problems are in the process of being addressed, but this was the first Cantonese feature to be in a release-able state and we figured it would be better than nothing at least.
Added options to use custom English/Pinyin fonts as well as custom Chinese ones, and made the custom Chinese font apply in more places (like radical input).
Switched to a much much prettier font (Tablet Gothic Compressed Semibold by TypeTogether, if you're wondering) for dictionary abbreviation icons.
Added a dedicated "Dictionary Browser" screen (accessible through Manage Dicts or by tap-holding on a search results entry) to let you view all of the entries in a dictionary in order and (for a user dictionary) easily edit / delete them.
Added an "always save first result" option (Settings / Dictionary / Main) to save the first entry in the results list to history even if you don't bother tapping on it to view it in detail.
Added an automatic database update check option.
Improved the reliability of background file downloads.
Improved the usefulness of "Components" data in the "Chars" tab of dictionary entries - it should now provide definitions / character searches for a lot of components that were previously missing them. (requires database update in Add-ons)
Added an option to support "Words" items by frequency when they're set to be merged multi-dict (Settings / Dictionary / Definition Screen Interface / Words)
Added an option to force the speech recognizer to recognize English instead of Chinese. (Settings / Dictionary / Search / Input Methods)
Added an option to shrink the text in the search input box. (Settings / Dictionary / Main Screen Interface / Portrait or Landscape)
On tablets, made the handwriting and radical input areas only take up the bottom half of the screen by default, and added an option (Settings / Dictionary / Search / Input Methods) to switch them back to fullscreen.
Successfully forced (we think) the built-in keyboards on devices by HTC and Sony Ericsson (among others) to not auto-replace / make suggestions in the search field, in spite of the fact that they ignore the standard Android API for doing this and display suggestions even when our app asks them not to. We also added an option in Settings / Dictionary / Input Methods to use an alternate approach for this (pretending this is a visible password field) on devices where our first workaround doesn't work.
Eliminated the "show reader if search string > N" option for startup searches - it made sense back on Palm OS when we originally introduced it, but between our new Reader shortcut icon and Android's "Share" and recent activity switching features it really didn't seem like it was worth having anymore.
Added an option in Settings / Dictionary / Main to keep the phone from turning off with the dictionary screen open
Made the dictionary switch button and menu language-independent when the search field is clear, so that it's easier to cycle through / verify the presence of all of your available dictionaries.
Improved the welcome screen to only show "welcome" text the first time the app is run, and to show several useful options (browse dictionary, "search tips," search history, and the instruction manual) any time you switch dictionaries with a blank search field.
Changed the document reader selection behavior on headwords to select the entire word rather than just the specific character you tapped on.
Retooled dictionary switching behavior a bit to make it more logical: among other things, the dictionary fallback order when cycling between dictionaries with a button press now differs slightly from that when entering a new search term (with a new search term it just starts from the beginning if it can't find a match in the current dictionary, since it seems unlikely that anyone would want to search the dictionary right after the one they happen to be in rather than the first one), the system will no longer skip over a multi-part regular Chinese search in favor of a fulltext one, and there's now an additional checkbox in Manage Dict Groups to specify that a full-text search group should only be used in a full-text (#-prefixed) search (so that now those "full-text, Eng dicts" type groups are accessible in those searches at least and not just after choosing them from the menu). We've also now changed the "use in search" option into a general "use in dictionary" option - if it's disabled then the cycle / menu options don't apply.
Updated nearly all of our dictionary databases to begin to converge towards our new typographic design - we're not done with that yet, and there are still a number of discrepancies between dictionaries, but we do at least have everything more-or-less properly tagged now (so examples everywhere will be TTSable, Pinyin everywhere will correctly display as Zhuyin if you've selected that, English full-text searches will no longer pull up a bunch of Pinyin results, and ~s are now replaced by their headwords almost everywhere) and should be able to fully synchronize everything in conjunction with the rollout of that new type design in the next few months, after which all sorts of other lovely things become possible (like a cross-dictionary example sentence search).
On top of all of that, Unihan is also updated to better cover rare characters and to use tone colors / support Pinyin searches.
Added support for inter-dictionary hyperlinks.
Sped up the scrolling of long dictionary entries and short reader documents on certain Android 4.0 devices.
Somewhat improved the speed of result list scrolling for long entries (e.g. 21C ones).
Greatly improved the speed of radical list scrolling on Android 4.x devices.
Slightly improved the speed with which handwriting returns results after each stroke.
Made full-text English search results attempt to clip the definition in the results list to the section containing the searched-for term.
Changed the behavior of multi-part character search results to show you results for the first character instead of the last.
Added a menu option when viewing a dictionary definition to copy the current headword to the clipboard.
Added an option to create a new user dictionary entry from a Chinese character search with incomplete results - this will only appear if you've already created a user dictionary in Settings / Manage Dicts.
Added "Waiting" result list text for long searches.
Tweaked the size of characters in the radical input box on smartphones with 768-pixel-wide displays (like the Nexus 4) so that it'll fill up the space more nicely.
Removed the "clipboard monitor" option, as the majority of Pleco users are now running an OS version that's not compatible with it (and that's unlikely to change with Android's generally stricter security policies).

Search engine

Merged multi-dict search now works in all search types and is enabled by default.
Merged full-text English searches now factor in frequency in their search result ranking as well as relevance and number-of-dictionaries-the-word-appears-in.
Introduced "Dictionary Groups," which allow you to specify a subset of your dictionaries and perform a merged search that includes them but no others. These are cycled through just like regular dictionaries, and can be configured the same way through their own screen in Settings / Dictionary. You can use this system to (among other things) prioritize full-text English over regular English searches - all of the built-in merged options are listed as groups too. You may want to disable "Use in toolbar" for some (or even all) dictionaries in Manage Dicts in conjunction with this, so that you can very efficiently switch between search types.
Added / enabled-by-default an option to reset to the first dictionary group if merged search is selected and you've switched to a single dictionary
Multi-word full-text English searches are much faster, especially when they involve very common words, and all full-text English searches handle partial searches much more intelligently (essentially they match on whatever word is alphabetically first across all dictionaries)
Chinese wildcard searches are also much faster and are no longer limited to the first few characters of a word
Full-text English searches are now supported in user dictionaries; you have to manually enable this feature for a particular dictionary in Settings / Manage Dicts, but it will automatically update the index when you add / delete / edit entries after that.
Added / enabled-by-default an option to intelligently handle regional spelling variations in full-text English searches (Settings / Dictionary / Search Settings / Full-text / Fuzzy English); if you type in "color" you'll also get "colour" matches and vice versa
Regular English-Chinese searches now return just the results that begin with your search term, rather than giving you every entry from the entire dictionary with the search term simply the top visible row.
Variants are now handled much, much more intelligently. Though a seemingly rather boring new feature, this was actually the trickiest single part of the whole overhaul: merged searches should be able to intelligently distinguish between unique words and different ways of writing the same word so you'll get fewer unnecessary results, and finally (finally!) most of the definition-less "alternate form of" / "see" / etc entries point to the actual definitions instead of requiring you to tap on a link. This is still a bit buggy for data file related reasons - takes a lot of work to correctly tag variants in all of them - but even in its current form it should be a vast improvement over what we had before.
English and Pinyin searches will now return a "no results found" if you enter a string that's too long, rather than returning the longest match - the former behavior was responsible for a lot of weird glitches (unwanted toggling between English and Chinese search, for example) and just in general didn't seem like the most logical / intelligent way to handle those cases.
Searches are now interruptible, the upshot of which is that in some searches you'll find that results come back a lot faster because the system doesn't have to wait for the previous search to finish first.
Stopped paying attention to capitalization in user-entered Pinyin searches, since it wasn't really helpful and some manufacturers' keyboards (we're looking at you, HTC) can switch you into caps-lock mode unintentionally.
Greatly sped up single-character and single-syllable searches by fixing a bug that was preventing them from using our new accelerated indexing system.
Also greatly sped up all wildcard searches, especially those on some older Android devices with performance-challenged virtual memory systems; this has given a modest speed boost to other search types as well.
Changed our wildcard system so that the standard ? for single character and * for multi-character wildcards are now supported regardless of configuration settings; however, you can still configure additional wildcards as well if you prefer, and to avoid confusing everyone we've left the @ and $ wildcards in as the defaults for those. (though those really only made sense on certain Palm OS keyboards where they were easier to enter than ? and *)

Flashcards

Added a simple one-button option to install (without an internet connection) premade flashcard lists; currently limited to HSK but about to support several others as soon as we get the copyright status checked out.
Improved flashcard sketch box and handwriting UIs: the former now has an Undo button, is now much faster / smoother and lets you operate the reveal / correct / incorrect / etc buttons while it's visible, the latter is now a good bit more reliable at showing you whatever's behind it and may be a bit smoother too.
Added an option in Interface to shrink the buttons on the bottom of the session screen.
"Limit unlearned" option in Card Selection turned into a "Limit new cards" option which will let you specify a maximum number of new cards to introduce per day instead of a maximum number total to have around at one time.
Added a new option in Card Selection for Repetition Spaced tests to show new cards at the start of the session.
Added an option in Scoring to show text below score buttons in Rep-spaced to tell you how long the interval will be before the next repetition if you select this score.
Added a menu command to directly resume the current flashcard session from the main screen on Android 4.0 devices.
Added options on Card Info to restore / discard the "dormant" custom definitions that are saved when you convert a card with a custom definition to a built-in dictionary one, and an option to skip those definitions when exporting in Export Cards.
Added a "view dictionary entry" tap-hold menu command in Organize Cards.
Improved explanatory alerts when skipping over invalid cards during a session.
Enabled the "undo" command in the period between tapping on the "correct" or "incorrect" button and choosing a particular score in SRS tests.
Gave card filter options more intelligent names.
Made import / export cards commands work more reliably in the background / with the device screen off
Changed the margins of text-less flashcard control buttons so that they'll appear more centered.
Updated SQLite to slightly improve performance of a few flashcard / user dictionary functions.
Added an option to select whether the flashcard sketch box should cover the session control buttons or not.
Added a menu option for "Organize Cards" to the flashcard testing screen.
Made the status / notification bar no longer hidden during flashcard tests.
Made the Card Info screen only remove a category when tap-held.
Made the sketch box "undo" button more visible in flashcard tests in night mode.
Gave the "tap with two fingers to clear" text an opaque background when the drawing box is transparent, so you don't have the ugly appearance of text on top of other text.
Enabled scrolling in the "View as dict entry" command in Organize Cards, though this can cause strange behavior with custom cards.

OCR

Added a "Crosshairs mode" option in live OCR - you can enable it through the corresponding menu command. This should let you OCR without having to manually resize the recognition area, which a lot of people seem to find annoying. We're still tweaking the text detection algorithm (it can get confused by computer monitors on some devices, for example) but in general it's working pretty well and in future releases we plan to combine this with more sophisticated motion tracking to really offer a whole new experience in live OCR - something that both totally eliminates "jitter" and improves recognition accuracy too.
Greatly improved the usefulness of the OCR continuous autofocus system, which you can enable in Settings / OCR / Live; it now works in macro mode and on pre-Android-4.0 devices, and is tied into the motion detection and character recognition systems so that it will (hopefully) only refocus when needed.
Heavily redesigned the OCR interface to make many more functions available, and all of them from a single button tap when the recognizer is paused; you're now two taps away from Google Translate (via the Share command), one tap away from searching for / bringing up the document reader on / copying-to-the-clipboard / playing audio for the current text (tap-hold on the audio button to hear the entire thing via text-to-speech), and one tap away from enabling / disabling our new "crosshairs mode," our old-but-improved continuous autofocus mode, and the "scroll rec area" still image option (where the recognition area is stuck on / scrolls with the image instead of floating above it).
Added all of these OCR commands in "Pulse Mode" too, which previously lacked even the flashcard / view entry buttons.
Added an OCR settings option to use our continuous autofocus system instead of the one built into Android, since we've found the performance of that to be lacking on some devices.
Greatly streamlined the code for taking a picture / loading a picture from within an OCR session, so that it'll switch screens a lot faster, load the new image more reliably when it's done, and not throw you back to the main dictionary search screen if you cancel.
Added direct clipboard copy commands to the menu bar.
Killed the annoying motion detection popup the first time you run OCR and made motion detection always on by default.
Made macro focus no longer on by default in OCR (since on the majority of phones now it seems to do more harm than good).
Added an OCR menu option to create a custom card (so no need to permanently change the "unknown word handling" setting, though that's still an option too).

Reader

Added a useful little shortcut: if you tap-hold on the "expand" button (|->, second from the left) it will immediately select an entire sentence, and if you tap-hold on it again, an entire paragraph.
Added optional (Settings / Reader) support for scrolling documents with direction pad buttons, mainly useful on some Sony e-readers which use those button codes for page scrolling.
Added an option (Settings / Popup Reader) to hide the popup reader search button in case you have a tendency to hit it accidentally and get taken away from your document.
Eliminated the annoying text encoding prompt that appeared after saving the clipboard to a file.
Changed the document reader's default behavior when adding a flashcard for a selection that's not in the dictionary to create a custom card with that text (rather than creating a card with the longest dictionary match)
Made the document reader refuse to open files that don't have a .txt/.gb/.b5/.u8 extension unless you specifically turn on an option to override that, to help with confusion concerning what file formats the reader supports.
Added an option (under Popup Definition) to auto-play audio after tapping on a word (but only that initial word tap) with the popup reader.
Increased the tappable area of the popup reader arrow buttons.
Added the ability for the Text File Reader to view "share"d online text files and Gmail attachments.
Improved support for Unicode Extension B/C characters in the popup reader.

Bug Fixes

Fixed several crashing bugs, including an additional, catch-any-lingering-problems fix for Android 4.1's notorious formatted text crashing bug.
Fixed rendering issues in the document reader and other places.
Fixed issue which caused search box sentence breakdowns to be interrupted by punctuation marks
Fixed issue which could cause erroneous conversions from tone marks back to tone numbers in certain instances
Fixed issue with flashcard multi-choice definition questions not always expanding correctly
Shrank the fonts in the audio download prompt so they'd fit in the buttons better.
Fixed a bug that could cause buggy stroke order rendering on extremely-high-resolution tablet screens
Fixed a bug that could cause the category "combine children" feature to fail in the middle of combining and end up not integrating all of the cards into the new parent category.
Made our most comprehensive attempt yet to fix the persistent crash-when-switching-screens issues - hopefully this one will finally squash them.
Fixed a bug that prevented the flashcard category "add new" option from appearing correctly if the option for multi-level category selection is enabled
Fixed a bug that could cause flashcard sessions to be shorter than configured when dealing with a huge number of "invalid" cards.
Fixed a crashing bug when performing batch flashcard commands.
Fixed a bug that caused the background of the color picker to be white instead of dark.
Fixed a crashing bug in the document reader when opening *extremely* long documents.
Fixed a bug that could cause audio to fail to play correctly with some Bluetooth headsets for very short recordings.
Fixed a bug that prevented the definition / character info / etc screen from remembering its last tab correctly.
Fixed a bug that could cause the "Chars" tab to be incorrectly blank for some characters.
Fixed a bug that prevented add-on file sizes from being calculated correctly if they involved lots of smaller files.
Fixed a rare crashing bug when tapping on an empty text field.
Fixed a bug that made the popup reader needlessly cramped on some smaller-screened phones.
Fixed a bug that made the popup reader needlessly far away from text at the end of a line
Fixed a bug that caused strokes in the the flashcard sketch box to be needlessly thick
Fixed a bug that caused null / corrupted search results on updating or deleting a dictionary
Fixed a bug that caused the search command in a copy of the document reader entered via another app with "Share" to fail to actually copy the selected text to the search input field
Fixed a bug that could cause flashcards to fail to be added to a category in OCR capture list mode when the duplicate handling for "not in cat" was set to "prompt."
Fixed a bug that could prevent some English-Chinese hyperlinks from linking correctly.
Fixed a crashing bug when viewing text at the very end of a long reader document.
Fixed a bug that caused the history screen to fail to return to the top of a list when switching tabs.
Fixed truncated buttons in the flashcard duplicate dialog.
Fixed a bug that could append erroneous 5th-tone numbers at the end of custom pronunciation strings in user dictionary imports.
Fixed a bug that caused English audio playback in definitions to include superscripts.
Fixed a bunch of flashcard test screen rotation bugs - editable fields should now retain their content and focus correctly on a screen rotation, the drawing box should preserve its contents, and the drawing box should no longer disappear and refuse to reappear after rotation.
Fixed a bug that prevented tap-holding on the + button in OCR from letting you select a flashcard category.
Made the Manage Dicts screen save changes more reliably.
Made the system save clipboard checksums more aggressively so that it should accidentally trigger the clipboard lookup option less often.
Fixed a bug that could cause interfaces to be reset when they weren't supposed to be when rotating the screen on devices running Android 3.0/4.0.
Added an actual error message when Pleco fails to load because of a corrupted code library (a surprisingly common problem on some Android devices).
Fixed a bug that could cause corrupted display of text containing tabs in the text file reader.
Fixed a bug that caused the clipboard command in the text file reader to copy the wrong data (or none at all).
Fixed the fuzzy rendering of the arrow buttons in the popup reader and stroke order diagrams box.
Fixed a bug that made the "browse entries" etc items on a failed search still tappable.
Fixed a bug that could cause the button bar in the Edit Entry screen to remain bright even in Night Mode.
Fixed (we hope) an issue that kept the keyboard from reappearing when the screen was rotated on some HTC devices.
Fixed a bug that could make it impossible to click on search results to view them in cases of extremely long result lists.
Fixed a bug that kept the "Searching..." progress spinner from showing up on some older Android devices.
Fixed a bug that caused the flashcard drawing box to sometimes clear when it wasn't supposed to.
Fixed a few other rare crashing bugs, including one related to resuming from the background after a long time off.Fixed a number of crashing bugs when various parts of Pleco were left in the background for a while - this was actually quite challenging since it involved coming up with a way to package up various data structures in a format that Android would be willing to hold on to for a longer time.
Corrected the sort order of Pinyin results in some dictionaries - this was a rather complicated low-level change too so please let us know if you find any discrepancies.
Fixed a bug that could sometimes cause OCR to fail to return results and fail to show a result even when tapped on.
Fixed a bug that prevented plecoregister: links from working correctly.
Fixed a bug that prevented full-width letters / numbers in headwords from being searched correctly (though implementing this requires some database updates).
Fixed a number of bugs related to the new launcher shortcuts not launching the app correctly.
Fixed a bug that allowed the creation of new user dictionaries with empty names.
Fixed a bug that caused garbled recognition results with some rotated still images.
Fixed a number of OCR crashing bugs related to buggy camera drivers.
Fixed a bug that could garble text copied to the clipboard from the popup reader.
Fixed a bug that could prevent full-text highlighted entries from correctly scrolling to the first matching section.
Fixed a couple of rare crashes relating to search result list updates.
Fixed a bug that could mix up the sort order of merged full-text English search results in English dictionaries.
Fixed a bug that could make the search input field so small as to be useless.
Fixed a bug that could screw up flashcard duplicate-checking for cards containing Unicode Extension B/C characters.
Fixed a bug that could occasionally prevent the search result list from updating correctly on startup.
Fixed a bug that kept the "can't connect to server" error from coming up repeatedly in "Add-ons."
Fixed a bug that kept the "choices from" custom category option for multiple-choice tests from working correctly.
Fixed a rare crashing bug when scrolling still image OCR.
Fixed a bug that could cause the standalone letter 'V' to appear as an umlauted u in Pinyin transcriptions (which applied to a single CC entry, V沟).
Fixed a bug that prevented 'r' syllables from rendering correctly in Zhuyin.
Fixed a bug that caused the [] and / display to be a bit odd in some traditional character variant cases.
Fixed a bug that prevented the @-to-ignore-pronunciation override character from working consistently in user dictionaries.
Fixed a crash when ending a flashcard session on a "skip card" or "delete card" command.
Fixed a bug that could cause flashcards to be added to a nonexisting category after doing an "erase database."
Fixed a bug that could prevent uppercase ABC hyperlinks from working correctly.
Fixed a crashing bug when viewing full-text search results for certain rare words.
Fixed a bug that could add extra spaces before headwords in some dictionaries.
Fixed a bug that could cause a "storage location changed" error on startup in cases where there's actually just an optional file update.
Fixed a bug that made the OCR launcher exit with no error message when the OCR database file was not installed.
Fixed a bug that prevented the controls in the General screen in Settings from updating correctly after a "reset all."
Fixed a bug that prevented the "(add new)" category option from working correctly in some screens with multi-level category selection enabled.
Put up an error (instead of just crashing) when attempting to take a photo in OCR on a device with no SD card.
Offered to re-download files in the case of the rare "no dictionaries found" error (which generally only happens on serious filesystem corruption), instead of simply putting up an error message.

2.3.14

Worked around the crash-on-startup / crash-on-viewing-entry bug on Android 4.1 in a much more definitive way; we went through and found the precise issue in Google's code (in fact in our bug report we told them exactly how to fix the bug for Android 4.2), and armed with this knowledge we were then able to re-structure the way our software handles text in such a way as to avoid triggering the bug. (rather annoying to spend ~5 days working around a bug that Google could have caught and fixed in a 10 minute code review, but manufacturer-created bugs like this have been part of mobile app development since the Palm days)
Fixed a smaller Android 4.1 bug that prevented the list selection from updating correctly when tapping on a new list item in two-panel mode.
Re-added some bug fixes in flashcards in 2.3.8 that had somehow been rolled back in the last few releases.

2.3.13

Fixed yet another Android 4.1 bug that could sometimes cause handwriting input to enter a new character after every stroke.

2.3.12

Fixed another Android 4.1 crashing bug relating to the same style-text word-wrapping issue on Google's side. (Google seriously needs to start doing developer beta-tests of new Android releases like Apple does)
Fixed a different Android 4.1 bug that prevented interrupted downloads from resuming correctly.
Fixed a rare crashing bug when moving Pleco into the background while in the middle of purchasing an add-on.
Fixed a crashing bug when leaving a numeric input field blank in Search Cards.

2.3.11

Rolled back the handwriting fix from 2.3.10 since it had some unintended side effects on a few devices (e.g. in the flashcard sketch box).

2.3.10

Fixed a slightly less nasty crashing bug in Android 4.1 that was caused by our previous bug fix.
Fixed an issue with superscripts not displaying correctly on Android 4.1.
Fixed an issue with flashcard categories not being selectable on Android 4.1 (when choosing categories to use in a flashcard test session).
Fixed a bug that prevented text sharing from certain apps (like "Pocket" via its email-sharing mode) from coming up in Pleco's reader correctly.
Fixed a bug that caused the handwriting recognizer box to be cleared but the virtual points to remain intact (so the recognizer still tried to recognize them) when switching out of / back into Pleco on Android 2.x.
Fixed a crash when trying to turn the OCR flash on / off on certain devices with no camera flash.
Attempted to fix occasional crashing bugs when putting Pleco in the background and when running background tasks like fetching the add-on catalog.
Put up an error message instead of crashing when attempting to open flashcards with a corrupted flashcard database.

2.3.9

Fixed a nasty crashing bug in Android 4.1 (technically working around a Google bug related to word-wrapping of styled text, but if our app crashes then it's our problem).
Fixed an intermittent crash when editing user dictionary entries.

2.3.8

Extended our free handwriting promotion until the end of 2012.
Fixed a bug that could prevent keyboard input from working correctly on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2.
Fixed a bug that prevented flashcard sessions from saving correctly when exiting the flashcard system by tapping on the reader 'search' button (magnifying glass).
Fixed a bug that could prevent changes to date/time-related flashcard settings from saving correctly.
Fixed a bug that could cause handwriting input to ignore very short strokes on some devices.
Fixed a bug that caused multiple-choice choices to become invisible after "Back" ing during a multi-choice test.
Fixed a bug that caused "Search Cards" setting changes to fail to register in some cases.
Fixed a crashing bug when "Share"ing a locally-stored web page with Pleco.
Fixed a bug that could prevent flashcard profile names from updating correctly after they were changed.
Fixed a bug that could cause crashes when viewing certain weirdly-formatted document files.
Fixed a bug that could cause crashes when exiting Pleco with no search history.
Fixed a bug that could cause crashes when editing cards in Organize with a weird ratio of categories to cards.
Fixed a bug that could cause crashes when putting Pleco in the background during the initial add-on download.
Fixed a bug that could cause crashes when viewing user dictionary entries with missing Pinyin.
Fixed a bug that could cause crashes when an add-on purchase was canceled / invalidated without Pleco already running in the background.
Fixed a bug that could cause audio to play when rotating the screen or resuming a saved session.
Tweaked the multi-choice Pinyin font size to keep "g"s from being truncated on super-high-res screens.
Fixed a crashing bug when copying empty document bookmarks.
Fixed a bunch of other rare crashing bugs relating to tasks running in the background.

2.3.7

Cleaned up the look of buttons in Night Mode a bit.
Prevented devices from sleeping during the initial data file download.
Rolled back our change to the appearance of full-text highlighting from 2.3.6, since a few people found the new one distracting.
Fixed a bug that caused problems for users repeatedly Restoring Market Purchases.
Fixed a bug that caused the background of the flashcard drawing box to be partially white (and therefore useless) in Night Mode
Fixed a bug that caused repeated custom font installs in the same session to fail on devices running Android 4.0.

2.3.6

New Features

Greatly simplified the process of installing a custom Chinese font file - it can now be done through Settings / General without having to kill and reopen Pleco.
Also greatly simplified the process of installing and backing up user dictionary databases - the former can be done through the "Add User" command in Manage Dicts, the latter through the "Backup Database" command on the individual dictionary's configuration screen.
Added an option (in Settings / Dictionary / Main screen interface / Portrait (or Landscape) orientation) to hide the gray "definition toolbar" that appears at the bottom of dictionary entries (but only in two-panel mode).
Added an option (in Settings / Dictionary / Main screen interface / Portrait (or Landscape) orientation) to replace the microphone and OCR buttons in the input selection toolbar with Full and Wild buttons, mimicking the design of our iOS software.

Design Tweaks

Made merged multi-dict search ignore Pinyin tones for multi-syllable words, which should improve its ability to merge entries from dictionaries with slightly different interpretations of Pinyin. (mostly an issue with neutral tones)
Made the flashcard batch "rebuild from dict entries" command clear out any previous custom flashcard definitions, so that cards will always pull text from their linked dictionary entries on a "convert to custom card."
Shrank and de-3Dified the "clear" button icon in the search bar, to fit with the rest of the app's theme better.
Android-ified the handwriting interface a bit by getting rid of the button background on the "undo" button, changing the "night mode" stroke area background to pure black, and making the backspace icon thinner and more Android-like.
Made the handwriting results box scroll back to the first item after every new stroke.
Made the OCR system remember the last recognition area size when reopened.
Made files in the "Updated" section of Add-ons display their updated dates.
Made the full-text highlight easier to spot by coloring the background behind the highlighted text rather than the text itself.
Made the default user interface layout on the Galaxy Note that of a normal-size smartphone rather than a 7" tablet.
Made the Chars and Words screens correctly jump to the top of their respective lists when a new character is selected.
Reduced the amount of keyboard "flicker" when starting up in handwriting input mode on devices running Android 4.0 (though we haven't been able to eliminate it altogether yet).
Added an alert pointing people to our own online store on the first attempt to make an in-app purchase after previously canceling one.
Made the OCR system copy text that you "send to reader" to the clipboard, so that you can easily get back to it later.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug that caused the handwriting input system to enter a new character after every stroke on Android 4.0 when using the Google Pinyin IME.
Fixed a bug that could occasionally cause purchases made through Android Market to fail to register correctly in Pleco's system until you "Restore Market Purchases."
Fixed a bug that could cause characters tapped on in the "Chars" tab, or in the "Radical" button below stroke order diagrams, to bring up info on their opposite-character-set versions.
Fixed a bug that could cause dictionary search "from first" to fail to trigger correctly when switching a dictionary with handwriting or radical input open.
Reduced the frequency of connection timeout errors when downloading a file in Add-ons.
Fixed a bug that could cause the order of dictionaries in Manage Dicts to reset itself on a dictionary update. (it will continue to reset on a new paid dictionary install, though)
Fixed a bug that made the character bar at the top of the definition screen scroll vertically instead of horizontally on devices running Android 4.0.
Fixed a bug that prevented our new install-addon-from-SD-card feature from working correctly after a device reset.
Fixed a bug that could cause the "Radical" appearing below stroke order diagrams to be in the wrong character set (simplified or traditional).
Fixed a bug that prevented the "Radical" below stroke order diagrams from appearing at all on normal-size smartphones in two-panel mode in portrait orientation.
Fixed a bug that prevented full-text search results that partially overlapped with a dictionary entry headword from being highlighted correctly.
Fixed a bug that caused changes to settings for score-based flashcard test subject selection to fail to be reflected on the screen.
Fixed an obscure bug that could prevent a few devices from activating any paid add-ons correctly.
Fixed a few very obscure crashing bugs (mostly in the add-on manager screen).

2.3.5

New Features

Added much easier methods to install files downloaded from outside of Pleco; there's a new package containing only Pleco's required files that you can place in the root directory of your device's storage memory to have Pleco automatically detect and offer to install the files from it, and a new menu command in "Add-ons" to install a single Pleco add-on package from a .zip archive.
Added Night-Mode-specific settings for tone colors and for the color of highlighted instances of the headword in example sentences; if you've already installed Pleco then these will default to preserving your old colors, but for new users they'll be a bit lighter and easier to spot against a dark background, and you can customize them to whatever you like.
Officially released our new "launcher icon" apps - these add extra icons to your Android program launcher screen to instantly open up Pleco in flashcard / reader / OCR mode.

Design Tweaks

Lightened the color of the full-text match highlighting in Night Mode (though for various technical reasons we haven't yet it made it customizable).
Made the handwriting recognition candidate highlight disappear when tapping on the search input field.
Added a helpful error message when attempting to restore an old database via Import Cards instead of Restore Database.
Made the popup reader scroll up text at the bottom of English-Chinese dictionary entries in two-panel mode so that it's visible above the bottom toolbar, or turn the toolbar transparent when that's impossible.
Made the option to clear pending purchases in Add-ons available when tapping on the Restore button as well as the Buy button.
Made the duplicate card dialog scrollable on devices with small screens that can't otherwise fit the whole thing.
Made the "Words" definition tab list scroll to the top when changing between 1 / 2+ / 1+.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug that prevented the insertion point from appearing correctly in the input field on devices running Android 4.0 when in handwriting or radical input mode.
Fixed a crashing bug when opening up images in OCR by "Send"ing them from the Gallery app.
Fixed a crashing bug in OCR when opening up invalid still images in general.
Fixed a bug that prevented the currently selected characters from being highlighted correctly in the document reader in Night Mode.
Fixed two obscure crashing bugs when downloading add-ons on a device with very low storage memory and/or very low RAM.
Fixed a bug that prevented entries from being consistently added to history on tablets when the definition remains visible with the keyboard open; now, if you simply go 3 seconds without changing the text in the search field or otherwise navigating to a different entry, Pleco will add the current entry to history.

2.3.4

Made the category selection dialog in flashcard sessions save your category selections upon pressing the back button, rather than popping up that annoying save prompt message and requiring you to tap "OK."
Rolled back the 2.3.2 change that caused the system to switch to keyboard input after running the voice recognizer, since it turns out that that causes a crash on certain Android 4.0 devices.
Fixed a few other obscure Android 4.0 crashes.

2.3.3

Actually fixed the stroke order test crash we'd thought we'd fixed in 2.3.2.
Fixed a bug that made flashcards that linked to demo version dictionaries show up totally blank instead of still showing their headword + Pinyin as they would for a dictionary that wasn't installed.
Cleaned up the delete confirmation dialogs in Organize Cards.

2.3.2

New Features

Added a new "Update Text" option to the flashcard duplicate handling prompt, and new dupe-handling options in Settings to do it automatically. This will change the text of the existing / matching card to that of your current dictionary entry. We've added this in response to a bunch of feedback we've gotten lately from people who don't like the fact that when you add an existing card to a new category, the card keeps its old definition even if you prefer the definition you just selected - mainly a problem if you import a big list of flashcards but then later start adding more cards individually as you look at dictionary entries.
Added similar "Update" options to import duplicate handling as well.
Added database backup and restore commands to Flashcards.
Added a button to let you override the "purchase pending" error when attempting to buy an Android Market add-on while Pleco thinks that another purchase is still in progress.
Made the flashcard "import" command continue running even when Pleco is put into the background - when you reopen, however, it will immediately pop up an import dialog (rather than letting you continue to use the dictionary during the import), since the system hasn't yet been redesigned to let you continue doing searches / manually adding flashcards / etc with an import in progress.

Design Tweaks

Improved the positioning / sizing of buttons in the popup reader bubble.
Made the system switch to keyboard input mode after using the voice recognizer with input open (since otherwise you'd have to switch modes to see the results).
Improved the positioning of icons on flashcard tone practice test buttons (which were a bit off-center vertically before).
Eliminated the confusing "Downloaded but not purchased" section in "Add-ons" - now those items will appear in the same place they appeared before you downloaded them, they'll just have an "already downloaded" after their names instead of a file size.
Made the progress dialog for the initial package download not quite so ridiculously wide on large-screen tablets.
Made downloading the demo version of a bundle in Add-ons jump you to the "D/Ls" tab so you can see the download progress.
Renamed the "Save" button in flashcard category selection to "OK."

Bug Fixes

Fixed (again) a crashing bug that mostly occurred when entering handwriting strokes on devices running Android 4.0.x.
Fixed a crashing bug when the option to "allow extra characters" is turned off in Search Settings.
Attempted to fix an unreproducible crashing bug in stroke order flashcard tests by adding extra checks / fixes everywhere that it might possibly be lurking.
Fixed a bug that caused the flashcard + button in combined results + definition mode to add a card based on the dictionary used in the search results, rather than the one selected in the definition panel, and that likewise caused that + button to fail to reflect the flashcard-added status of the dictionary + definition selected in the definition panel.
Fixed a bug that caused Pleco to simply do nothing when launching OCR from the OCR Launcher app on a device without OCR installed.
Fixed a crashing bug involving blank flashcards in Organize Cards.
Fixed a bug that made the "grayed-out" switch dictionary button in combined results + definition mode look identical to the non-grayed out one when in Night Mode.
Fixed a bug that caused words tapped on at the very top of the screen in fullscreen English-Chinese definitions to be hidden behind the top toolbar, even when it's possible to move them below it by scrolling.
Fixed a crashing bug relating to "Send"ing some types of images to the Pleco still image OCR system.
Fixed a bug that caused still image OCR to crash instead of gracefully exiting on some types of out-of-memory errors.
Fixed a number of display glitches relating to "pron mode" being set to "skip" - that will now hide pronunciation from items in the Entry List (without having to separately configure it), and will also hide them in ABC/PLC (and soon other) example sentences without leaving any weird parentheses / numbers / etc behind. And hyperlinks that rely on having some sort of pronunciation text to work correctly will now show pronunciation even with "skip" turned on.
Fixed a bug that prevented disabling the "1-char for 1-char" option from taking effect on character (but not Pinyin) searches.
Fixed a crashing bug when exporting XML flashcards that have had their priority or "force add" / "exclude" status changed from their default value.

2.3.1

Fixed a bug that could cause repeated crashes when using In-App Billing on some devices. (the "took too long to deliver" errors, however, are entirely on Google's end and there's not much we can do about them aside from pointing you towards our own store)
Added a new live OCR option "Alternate video display" which should improve compatibility on some devices with buggy camera drivers like the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray.
Fixed two rare crashing bugs related to very strange configurations in text fields.
Fixed a bug that caused copyright symbols in the About box to appear as empty boxes.
Fixed a bug that could cause items in "Add-ons" to appear as black text on a black background.
Fixed a rare crashing bug related to OCR exiting at a very precise time in the OCR recognition cycle. (at least that's what we think was causing it)

2.3.0

First release of Pleco on Android.

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