Added experimental AnkiDroid integration. (this requires AnkiDroid 2.6 or later)
The approach we’ve opted for on this is basically to assume that anybody who wants to use Pleco with AnkiDroid a) is a heavy AnkiDroid user already and so would like us to fit into their existing workflow, and b) probably has little or no interest in using our own flashcard system alongside AnkiDroid; we’ve therefore designed it to ‘take over’ Pleco flashcard functions entirely, so that all flashcard adding + duplicate check commands will now go to AnkiDroid instead of to Pleco.
You can configure this in Settings / Flashcards; each AnkiDroid model you want use needs to be configured as far as how it links up to Pleco.
Tags are handled a bit oddly - there’s not currently a way to query AnkiDroid for the list of active tags, so instead we have you type in a comma-separated list of tags that you’d like to be able to view / assign in Pleco in preferences. (we also display tags in dictionary definition headers, though not yet with any particular associated colors)
We even support cloze deletions; turn on “+ for each example” in Settings / Definition Screen and configure a model for sentences in Settings / Flashcards and you’ll then be able to automatically create Anki cloze cards from Pleco example sentences in a single tap.
Integration also includes a duplicate dialog (with an HTML preview of the card) and even an editing screen, so you can actually view + edit the text of your existing AnkiDroid notes within Pleco if you for example come upon some new insight about a particular word while viewing one of our dictionary entries. Long-pressing the + icon will let you preview a card before creating it + customize its model / deck tags.
Made PDF + (still image / block recognizing) OCR scroll around to follow the popup reader instead of staying in one spot.
Made PDF reader remember your last location when returning from a different part of Pleco.
Changed Screen Reader invocation a bit so that it will now default to showing a notification along with a floating button for new users, in anticipation of changes coming in future versions of Android that will require background services to show notifications in order to avoid being terminated.
Added new experimental Kai-style stroke order diagrams; you can download them in Add-ons / Features, they’ll unlock the same characters as our existing free ones in the free version + unlock about 8500 additional characters if you own our paid Stroke Order Diagrams add-on; for that latter bit, you may need to go into Registration / Check for other purchases for them to activate. Toggle between those and the older Song-style stroke order diagrams by tapping on the button at the bottom left corner of the stroke order box.
Added an option in Settings / Definition Screen to auto-play stroke order diagrams.
Added a ‘report missing entry’ button to the long search breakdown toolbar.
Added an option in Settings / Miscellaneous to delete + force a re-download of Pleco’s built-in data files (in case they get corrupted).
Added support for Android 7.1 launcher shortcuts; these can be customized in Settings / Miscellaneous.
Added an Android 7.1 round application icon.
Made ’share’ing with Pleco generally no longer open the keyboard.
Made Yale romanization for ‘m’ and ‘ng’ syllables add ’h’es where appropriate.
Fixed a bunch of missing Cantonese readings for single syllables in CC-CEDICT.
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.
Fixed a bug that could cause the audio buttons next to variant pronunciations in dictionary entries (e.g. in the Cross-Straits dictionary) to play the audio for the original word instead of the variant.
Fixed a bug that could cause some valid Yale Cantonese search strings to fail to return results.
Fixed a bug that could make it impossible to hear Cantonese text-to-speech when you had the male Cantonese recordings installed and only those.
Fixed a bug that made the option to put up a category prompt on just tapping the + button not work with example sentences.
Fixed a bug that could cause the dictionary order in Manage Dictionaries to be reset when reloading the add-on catalog.
Fixed a bug with OCR ‘reopen last image’ on PDF files.
Fixed a bug that could prevent custom flashcard creation from working correctly after choosing a caetgory with the multi-level category chooser.
Fixed a bug that could cause third-tone pinyin syllables to go missing in flashcard multiple-choice tests on some devices from Chinese OEMs with inexplicably buggy Pinyin support.
Fixed (we hope) some bugs relating to Pleco’s persistent access to opened files.
Fixed a crash when trying to take photos for still OCR in Android 7.
Fixed a few more random crashing bugs, including one when putting Pleco in the background on Android 7, one when opening the image picker on some devices, and one when changing text encodings in the reader.
A massive update with an unassuming version number:
Also added a “Screen OCR” function - this one is for Android 5 only (earlier versions didn’t support the necessary API). It basically just takes a screenshot and instantly OCRs it, popping up a simplified version of our OCR interface with a popup bubble for looking up words. Less reliable than Screen Reader and without quite as much future potential, but useful for apps where Screen Reader doesn’t work well. This one is not free, but it’s included with our OCR add-on, so no extra purchase needed if you already have that. Like Screen Reader it’s accessed via a floating button, and you can turn either reader option on or off with a long press of that floating button
Added PDF support to both the document reader and OCR - open a PDF in the document reader to view embedded text, open one in Still OCR to recognize it as a series of images.
Added native x86 code libraries for the sake of people with x86-based tablets or using desktop emulation solutions like ARC Welder - Pleco should be screaming fast on those now. Note that the text-to-speech add-ons are still ARM-only, so if your device can’t run ARM code in emulation, most of Pleco should work (including handwriting and OCR) but text-to-speech will probably still refuse to load.
Also for the sake of our ARC Welding friends, added four new control key shortcuts; control-F jumps you back to the search screen with an open empty search bar regardless of where you are in our app, control-R does that and pastes the current content of the clipboard into the search field, control-D adds the current word to flashcards, and control-O plays audio.
Brought back a separate image gallery option in the Still OCR open menu on Android 4.4 and later.
Fix for a longstanding Clipboard Monitor bug that would cause the Settings screen (and some other tabs as well) to be blank if Pleco was launched directly from Clipboard Monitor while that tab was open + you then switched back to it.
Fixed a really nasty bug (in some Google-supplied code, but that’s neither here nor there…) that could cause startup hangs when opening a copy of Pleco downloaded from Google Play while in China.
Made “Select All” in the search field also pop up a selection menu again so you can copy / paste / etc immediately.
Made the popup reader bubble position itself correctly on Samsung devices in split-screen mode.
Updated a bunch of minor data files, so you’ll get slightly better character decompositions in a few cases and a few font corrections, among other things.
Made Pleco Reader / Pleco OCR appear more reliably in the “share” screen for text / PDF / image files, and made them actually open the files correctly when you select them. (we hope)
Added a new control-R keyboard shortcut, which simultaneously jumps you back to the dictionary and pastes in whatever is in the clipboard.
Overhauled the still OCR “scrollable focus” mode - now, when you tap on the button to enable that, you’ll see a reduced set of OCR control buttons and get a popup reader bubble when you tap on a character (instead of the bottom-of-the-screen definition).
Moved clipboard monitoring to a system service and made it restart automatically when you reboot your phone if it was running before you rebooted. We also do that with Screen OCR / Screen Reader.
Improved live OCR accuracy on devices with higher-resolution screens (we think), using a simple trick from our iOS app that was yet another Thing We Forgot To Port To Android For Way Too Many Years.
Inspired by Screen Reader, went through Pleco’s own UI and added accessibility text to all of the parts of our UI that didn’t already have it - we’re ashamed that it took us this long to do that, but in any event our visually impaired users should now have a slightly easier time finding their way around our UI. If you’re an Android developer yourself Screen Reader is actually a very handy tool for giving yourself a quick accessibility tuneup - just go through each screen, run Screen Reader, and add content description texts to any UI controls that Screen Reader doesn’t see.
Added an input method switching option to the tap-hold popup menu in edit fields.
Fixed (we hope) slowdowns in the clipboard reader in ARC Welder.
Added support for Ruby Zhuyin display (small Zhuyin text next to individual characters). We’ve done this pretty comprehensively - can be enabled not only in dictionary entry headers but also in search results, example sentences, flashcards, and the popup reader - and are planning to do a lot more with it in the future (automatically adding it to reader documents, e.g.) and to extend it to not only Zhuyin but to Pinyin and to Jyutping/Yale for Cantonese (though these would appear above/below rather than next to characters). Enable it in its dedicated options screen in Settings / Languages. Note that this will prevent regular Zhuyin from displaying if you’ve set that as one of your pronunciation systems, but if you use Pinyin as your pronunciation system and also enable side Zhuyin the two will happily coexist.
Completely overhauled the way we handle text selection in our search field - now, long-pressing it will always (and we hope reliably) bring up a Pleco edit menu with copy / paste / select all as appropriate, mimicking the behavior on Android M and doing it in a more consistent way than we’ve managed to achieve relying on Android itself to produce that behavior.
Added an option in settings to use old-fashioned file open / save dialogs even on devices that are running Android 4.4 or later and ought to have access to the newer SAF ones, since those don’t work correctly in some forked versions of Android. Automatically enabled them on ARC Welder since they’re currently broken on that.
Added a male Cantonese audio add-on, and a new Cantonese audio gender preference in Settings / Audio.
Did some preliminary optimization for Android M, including a few bug fixes, support for more gracefully handling denied permissions (though we can’t ship all of that until they release a final Android M developer kit), and a migration away from the now no longer supported Apache HTTP framework for network connections.
Added an item to the Categories section of Card Info to let you add a card to the current default category with a single tap, and made Card Info an option for duplicate handling in settings / flashcards, this as part of a longer-term plan to replace the duplicate prompt with Card Info altogether by making all of the prompt’s features available in Card Info.
Made the color of full-text highlights lighter for better visibility against tinted example sentences.
Moved the loading of user dictionaries to a background thread, which should mean faster startup and a fix for the annoying bug that sometimes caused user dictionaries to be buried at the bottom of Manage Dicts even if you’d previously put them elsewhere.
Migrated to a new settings storage system which we hope will make settings / history a bit more immune to accidental deletion on buggy or misbehaving or extremely-short-on-memory devices.
Added long-click category selection support to the optional + buttons next to example sentences in definitions and the optional ones in individual dictionaries’ definition headers. (you can enable both of those in Settings / Definition Screen if you didn’t know they existed before)
Added the ability to deliver updated versions of CC-CEDICT through Google Play without updating the rest of our app, which should let us update it for GPlay users much more frequently than we could otherwise. (we’re going to make these available to other users too, but probably with some sort of opt-in registration process since otherwise every time we updated it we’d rack up a few TB worth of CDN bandwidth bills)
Added tone coloring in a few places it didn’t appear before, most importantly in English-Chinese dictionary definitions - this requires a database update, we’ve got one available for NWP right now and will have one for ABC E-C shortly too.
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).
Made the number strings after flashcard backup files appear as sensible year-month-day-hour-minute numbers instead of Unix epoch times, and added them to flashcard exports by default (now that we have an option to remove them in settings / miscellaneous).
Got rid of the annoying “tap with two fingers” text in the non-handwriting-input flashcard sketch box.
Made Pinyin/Zhuyin no longer display in “VARIANT OF” items with pronunciation system set to “none,” and updated “YY” in Cantonese variants to “YL”/“JP” to match how they appear in dictionary headers.
Moved to a new system for saving / opening still OCR photos taken with “take picture” which we hope will work more reliably on some forked Android versions (and on Android M).
Added ‘conceal handwriting until done’ and ‘Enter concealed immediately’ options in Test Settings for fill-in-the-blanks handwriting tests, letting you prevent the handwriting recognizer from giving you hints to the correct character; with the former option enabled, you’ll only see results in the recognizer when you tap with two fingers to clear, and with the latter, the resulting character will also be entered immediately so you don’t have a chance to correct it if you screwed up.
Made the definition screen refresh itself correctly after adding or deleting a user dictionary entry.
Made incorrect answer characters in flashcard fill-in-the-blanks tests tappable so you can get to their definition screens and find out more about them.
Made font sizes in the sidebar menu scale up if your overall Android font size setting is set to something higher than the default.
Added an option in Settings / Miscellaneous to put a clipboard monitor toggle at the top of the drawer menu for more convenient access.
Hid stroke order for the opposite character set if Pleco is only configured to display one set in the headword.
Fixed a bug that kept the initial file download dialog from being correctly themed for Android 5.
Fixed a bug that made the text editing cursor in the search field invisible on some devices.
Fixed a bug that could cause flashcard export files that were overwriting previous files with the same name to leave behind some data from the older file.
Fixed a bug that made the onscreen back button in OCR fail to trigger correctly after rotating the screen.
Fixed a bug that made the onscreen back button appear white even against light-colored themes on Android M (and sometimes on 5.1).
Fixed a bug that could cause the edit entry screen to prompt you to save changes even if you hadn’t made any.
Fixed a bug that could cause the contents of flashcard edit fields to be reset on returning from another screen.
Fixed a bug that prevented XML flashcard files from importing correctly on newer devices.
Fixed a bug that could cause custom entries / flashcards with numbers in them to lose their correct tone coloring after an edit.
Fixed a bug that could prevent headwords in Hangul or Kana in C-E flashcards from being magnified correctly.
Fixed a bug that prevented super-rare / image characters like old character forms in Grand Ricci Histoire from rendering correctly in Night Mode.
Fixed a bug that made Zhuyin characters enlarge along with Chinese characters with the “larger Chinese” option enabled.
Fixed a bug that prevented copyright strings in user dictionaries from saving correctly.
Fixed a bug that could cause a user dictionary to fail to be created if its name was identical to that of a previous user dictionary.
Made the “full-text only” flag for dictionary groups work regardless of the “Integrate C-E Fulltext” / “Integrate E-C Fulltext” settings, part of our long-term transition to a simpler and more group-driven dictionary management system.
Fixed a bug that prevented punctuation and extended Unicode characters from carrying through to the other fields in an auto-filled custom card / dictionary entry composition screen.
Fixed (we think) a bug that could sometimes cause the input method selection bar to fail to reappear on returning from a definition screen.
Fixed a bug that kept flashcard test definitions from updating immediately after changing the dictionary a flashcard is linked to via the separate dictionary screen.
Fixed a bug that could prevent categories in text exports from exporting in the correct order.
Fixed a bug that made the flashcard session switch dictionary option remain grayed out and unaccessible for custom cards for which exactly 1 dictionary match was available.
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 could cause statistics to be included in XML flashcard exports even with the option for that 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 sometimes cause full-text highlights in the result list to not match up with the words being highlighted. (most often with full-text English searches in E-C dictionaries)
Fixed a couple of minor bugs relating to headword / pronunciation text formatting.
Fixed a bug that prevented the creation of flashcards from example sentences in English-Chinese dictionaries.
Added Cantonese support to flashcards; enable this in New Test / Display / Use Cantonese. (paid flashcard add-on only) This applies everywhere - display of cards but also audio playback and even fill-in-the blanks / tone practice. When you enable “Use Cantonese” a prompt will appear to offer to fill in Cantonese readings for cards that don’t have them; you can also do this through Organize Cards / Edit / Batch, and assuming that you have Cantonese enabled, Pleco wil automatically attempt to add Cantonese readings for any new cards when you create or import them.
In import files, to import Cantonese enclose it in {} brackets and put it at the end of the second column (where Pinyin normally goes); for consistency we currently only accept / output Jyutping romanization in flashcard import/export files.
Added the option to repeat incorrect cards during a flashcard test instead of at the end of it, via a new “time” option for “repeat incorrect” (in New Test / Commands). This will happen at a fixed but customizable interval after the incorrect answer - we don’t try to SRS it (we’re unconvinced that that would help). If any incorrect cards are still pending at the end of the test, it will continue cycling through those until you get each of them correct (as with the current repeat incorrect / loop behavior).
Added support for efficiently adding example sentences to flashcards. Go into Settings / Definition screen and turn on “+ button for each example” to enable that; after you do, a flashcard + button will appear at the end of every example sentence (if it includes English).
Added new commands in Edit / Organize Cards / Batch to automatically generate missing simplified, traditional, Mandarin, and Cantonese readings for cards. Also added a option to Import Cards to invoke this behavior in imports. We also added options to delete the current contents of those fields (in case you find yourself with some Cantonese you want to remove, say), to remove hidden custom definitions (we leave those in your database if you remap cards to the dictionary), and to swap the simplified / traditional fields (in case you import some cards incorrectly and don’t catch it right away).
Added an option for Cantonese tone coloring in Settings / Colors. (feedback on the color scheme is welcome)
Added an “Auto-generate if missing” option for Cantonese (Settings / Language) which attempts to generate a Cantonese reading for a dictionary entry if it doesn’t already have one. This doesn’t yet work for searches (we won’t let you search for those auto-generated readings, in other words) but it does work pretty much anywhere you might display Cantonese - reader, OCR, etc along with the main dictionary. We add a ± symbol after these auto-generated readings so you can distinguish them from the official ones.
Added {} brackets around Cantonese readings in reader / OCR.
Added a duplicate card alert when updating a card’s definition in Card Info or during a test in such a way that it will end up conflicting with another card.
Added an R at the start of the card counter when reviewing incorrect cards at the end of a test.
Removed the notice about reviewing incorrect cards at the end of the test if they’re set to appear during a test and you’re just finishing off the still-pending ones at the end.
Made “back to dict, then exit” the default back button behavior.
Made continuous autofocus on by default in OCR.
Restructured the live OCR capture view to hopefully get it behaving better on the Galaxy S5 and a few other problem devices.
Improved search breakdown behavior for searches containing punctuation marks. (in a few cases it was actually breaking down too aggressively and missing out on the fact that there was a larger word, in other cases it was searching across punctuation marks when it shouldn’t be)
Made the edit entry button always appear in the search bar in two-panel mode (if you have an editable user dictionary installed).
Made Cantonese work better when the Mandarin pronunciation mode is set to “blank” (so that there’s no Mandarin displayed at all) - Cantonese readings + audio buttons should now appear correctly in that case.
Made multiple-choice choices appear in a smaller font / prompt for confirmation (if you’ve enabled the relevant option in Test Settings) for characters and Pinyin/Zhuyin (not just English) if the text is long enough to need it.
Added a tap-hold dictionary selection menu for the flashcard dictionary change button.
Dramatically boosted speed of some types of Chinese search through a couple of optimizations to our database access system.
Added a more powerful text segmentation system (something to break long strings of Chinese text up into their component words). It’s still somewhat experimental, so for now we only deploy it by default for the above automatic text generation features in flashcards, but if you turn on “Intelligent segmentation” in Settings / Search Engine it will try to use it for multi-character breakdown searches too.
Made the custom flashcard / user dictionary entry screens from the popup reader + OCR fill in opposite character set / Pinyin / definition just as the ones from search results now do.
Made searches with trailing * characters no longer sort by length.
Made flashcard category tags now appear for all of the cards for a particular dictionary entry (in the event that you have duplicate cards).
Added support for radical characters to our “enhanced” handwriting recognizer (download the updated version of that in Add-ons, then enable radical recognition in Settings / Input Methods / Handwriting).
Added our own crash reporting system, which will automatically collect crashes in copies of Pleco not downloaded from Google Play.
Added an option to disable the two-finger tap gesture in handwriting (in response to several complaints that it was making usage with a stylus difficult).
Added a “restore dormant custom definitions” command to Batch (to go along with the recently added to command to remove them).
Added a “shuffle” option for repeating incorrect cards during a test. This applies both during the test (for cards answered incorrectly within a few seconds of each other) and in the review of remaining incorrect cards at the end of the test.
Added text-to-speech playback buttons in example sentences in the Guifan Cidian (which lacked them before).
Stopped showing “unknown volume”s in installation volume prompt screens on startup, and made the system automatically choose the good volume in cases where there’s only one of them.
Worked around a bug in the draggable scrollbar control on Android 4.4 (entirely Google’s fault, see https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=63545) by forcing the scroll bar to always appear in the main Dictionary and Organize Cards screens on devices running 4.4 or later. The bug appears in the current version of Android L too, but since it’s fixed in the latest update to 4.4 we’re assuming they also fixed it for the finished release of L and have therefore left the fix disabled on that.
Fixed a bug that could cause incorrect breakdowns of searches containing a lot of punctuation.
Fixed a bug that caused incorrect text to be copied to the clipboard + incorrect position resuming on screen rotate in the document reader.
Fixed a few more bugs in Yale-romanized Cantonese search and made it now allow (but not do anything special about) ’h’es in syllables.
Fixed a bug that kept the entry-specific + button from working in some entries.
Fixed a bug that could cause random jumping to incorrect locations on resuming a document reader session.
Fixed occasional crashing bugs in text rendering on devices running Android 4.0.
Fixed a bug that could cause auto-generated strings to ignore terminating ’er’s.
Fixed a bug that could cause incomplete handwriting input (in partial-screen handwriting mode) to be saved to the search history.
Fixed a bug that prevented the document reader from correctly recognizing words split by commas.
Fixed a bug that could cause incorrect results to be returned for a few full-text searches (like ‘aardvark’).
Fixed a bug that could cause laggy / halting scrolling through search results on some devices.
Fixed a bug that made it possible to deselect the text input boxes in tone practice tests and made it possible for tones to fail to enter correctly when you did.
Fixed a bug that caused text-to-speech to fail to acknowledge / pause for punctuation marks.
Fixed a bug that could cause the flashcard “convert to dict-based card” command to yield inexact matches.
Fixed a bug that could cause wacky popup reader behavior for strings of text that contained wildcard characters.
Fixed a bug that made apostrophes before bolded headword pinyin in example sentences appear bold when they weren’t supposed to.
Fixed a bug that made headers in user dictionary entries list “PY” even when displaying Zhuyin text.
Fixed a few bugs in parsing of Yale romanized Cantonese text (though we’re still working on the ‘h’ problem).
Fixed a few crashing bugs.
New Features / Design Changes
Bug Fixes
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
New Features / Design Changes
Bug Fixes
General
Dictionary UI
Search engine
Flashcards
OCR
Reader
Bug Fixes
New Features
Design Tweaks
Bug Fixes
New Features
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
New Features
Design Tweaks
Bug Fixes
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