Can users here recommend which pleco bundle to buy ..I am a newbie to Chinese. Is the complete worth it?
Doesn't the free dictionaries in pleco serve the purpose?
Which is the best dictionary to read a lot of sample sentences for words?
Does the audio pronunciations in pleco read full sentences?

My favorite Pleco dictionary, and the one that gets the most use, is currently the Tuttle Learner's C-E, available in the complete bundle, or as a seperate add-on.

There are at least two example sentences per word, very useful constructs, and are free of political overtones. The scope is quite focused! targeting the old HSK beginner level words and other useful modern words. I also own the paper copy and it's the only dictionary I ever sit down to browse and read through.

You can browse sample entries of Pleco's dictionaries here: http://www.pleco.com/ippricing.html

Sentence TTS is coming in a future Pleco update.

The free dictionaries are pretty good, but many example sentences in them sound like they're written by a 1960s communist party.

For E-C, NWP has the best selection of sample sentences.

so far i havent bought any bundle. i bought stroke order diagrams,
the optical character recognizer and
the flashcard system.

the one that i have used most so far is the optical character recognizer.
the stroke order diagrams are quite useful to. the flashcards i havent used much.

If I purchase a dictionary will I get it's updates if it is updated on a later date?

In the 7 years I've been using Pleco, I've never had to pay for dictionary updates.

Are They updqted? Also do i get to hear full sample sentences with audio fera tuer or just some words?
Thanks lechuan for inputs....
Leaning towards getting TTS

Not sure if lechuan was referring to actual dictionary database updates or to software updates - we don't generally charge for either, to date the only things we've ever charged people for are new features and a few features that had to be-repurchased when moving between platforms (handwriting input when moving from Palm OS to Windows Mobile and stroke order diagrams when moving from Palm/WM to iPhone/Android).

Dictionaries do get updated but it generally depends on the publisher. I can say specifically that the ABC gets updated quite regularly and we probably update our version of it (free-of-charge to users) once a year; Tuttle generally not so often but we actually recently licensed an expanded edition of that which we should be debuting later this year. (that one won't be a free upgrade, since it's a new title and we have to pay new royalties on it, but there should be a discount for people who bought the old one)

For really current vocabulary it's not really possible to beat CC-CEDICT at the moment, though, which is why we offer that as a free add-on too. And our major low-level programming project for the last year or so has been getting everything set up so that you can type in a search term and get a merged / collated / frequency-sorted list of results from every dictionary at the same time, making it easier to juggle multiple dictionaries without having to flip between them. (INCREDIBLY hard to do well, actually; searching a dozen or more dictionaries simultaneously and returning results in real time is tricky enough, but then there are also lots of words for which different dictionaries have slightly different takes on the proper Pinyin tones / traditional variant / etc, and we have to differentiate between those editorial disagreements and cases like 历年 and 后座 where there are two totally different words in traditional that happen to have the same characters in simplified)

Sentence TTS is indeed coming in a future update (also as a paid add-on - again, royalties) - it'll work on every example sentence in every dictionary, no reason why it can't since it's synthesizing the audio from the text. Should also work with text in document reader documents.

Mike how many people fake as students for saving money in purchases?
Who loose more money that way ? Plecoptera or dictionary publisher?
Does a student have to pay more money when he is no more a student for a dictionary he/she paid as a student and got with a discount? Hoe do you track all this?

Thanks mike. Will buy turtle dict I think and will eagerly wait for TTS. When will it come?Hope it won't be priced too high.
When are more dictionaries getting added? Will Oxford come to iOS?

@Chino learner - We don't know exactly, we sell more student discounted copies on iOS than non-discounted ones but we also sell to a lot of students :-) Who loses more money depends on the particular add-on; with some add-ons the pain is shared, with others it's all on us. (can't be more specific than that, I'm afraid)

We don't charge people to switch from a student to a non-student copy later, in fact we really can't do anything beyond the "honor system" with student discounts. Apple's official policy is that you have to charge everybody the same price for every add-on - no user-specific "coupon codes" or anything - and on top of that all purchases on iOS are totally anonymous, so we aren't really in a position to enforce any specific student discount restrictions; when someone writes us to ask if a borderline case qualifies (not a student yet but about to be, currently a student but about to graduate, parent who wants to help with kid's Chinese homework, Australian soldier in Iraq learning Chinese independently in preparation for his next job [that was a cool email]) we pretty much always say yes.

But we don't offer student discounts at all on Android and we've been playing around with phasing them out on iOS too (setting our prices somewhere in the middle). They create a lot of support headaches since people don't realize they're eligible for them / don't realize they have to tap on a switch to activate them, and are ticked off because the only way to get the discount after the fact is to write Apple to request a refund of the entire purchase (not always granted) and then re-buy the app at the discounted price (assuming that Apple's anti-fraud system hasn't blacklisted you because of the refund request). We aren't able to issue refunds through their system, aren't permitted to pay them out directly and they themselves refuse to issue any kind of a partial refund / credit since they don't acknowledge the existence of student discounts, so we've basically got a major customer support problem that we have no way to address except by getting rid of student discounts.

@Sandeep - definitely before the end of the year, hopefully well before. Oxford is most certainly coming to iOS, yes - isn't on it yet because some awkwardness concerning Apple's in-app purchase system (and the security thereof) has compelled us to wait until our next major update to introduce any new paid dictionaries.

Wow, Pleco is getting TTS? I thought the major update was just drastic/improved interface changes and more dictionaries, are there any other addons coming our way?

TTS will probably be the only paid non-dictionary add-on this time around, though there are two others in the "maybe" pile (one of which is new fonts, which are already licensed but we're not sure whether or not to charge for them). Though almost all of our existing add-ons will be getting some sort of major new feature / upgrade.

Ah nice. Thanks for answering! :D

@Mike thanks for all the inputs.

Can anyone tell if the document reader works with PDF's as well?

Also can OCR take whole pages as input with text which is a mix of english and chinese? Ignoring the english text?

What is TTS please?
Chinese learning has become wonderfully nerdy.

Text to speech..

Sandeep it doesn't work with pdf's in the main. I think when I looked into it there were some types of PDF supported but most not. I bought most of the add ons, not the extra dictionary's, I always thought the basic dictionary was fine... I should have probably bought the whole pack as I think that gave a considerable discount, but I found a lot of the addons are not very user friendly and take a while to get used to. The audio pronunciation was fairly useful, stroke order I barely ever used, skritter is way better at teaching this. Full screen handwriting, I only bought this so that I could do the flash card writing test which is quite useful, I like to do that writing test after I feel I have learnt it on skritter as its more difficult. The optical character recognition I used quite a bit in the early stages of my degree, I would photograph the page of my textbook so while reading through anything I didn't know I could translate. Now I have my textbooks in PDF format, it would be a massive help if the document reader could read pdf's otherwise I have never used it, probably because I haven't found much content easily added, so many different file formats and it doesn't seem to display very nicely, maybe I haven't put enough effort into learning how to use it, I'm the sort of person who loses interest if it's not very simple to use. The flashcard system I used a lot in the early stages as well, but haven't used it much recently with the discovery of skritter and memrise, I don't have enough time to do pleco flashcard as well.

@bjnsharp.. xie xie. you are spending tons of time into skritter. every time i check your stats you tend to have added an hour or two. Keep up the good work.
what will be your email?

Seems you are going at a fair rate as well. I did already have quite a bit of previous knowledge of Chinese before starting though. Trying to do an hour a day which usually clears all my reviews, but so busy with work at the moment. Next month can put some more effort in.

Thanks.
I use OCR software for German, I think it works for Chinese too. So I can load a PDF in my program (Abbyy FineReader) and if the text is good quality, I get a processable file.

@Sandeep - doesn't work with PDFs yet, but the OCR module should do so in our next (iOS) release - already working in our development builds. If you convert your PDF into image files (JPG, PNG, etc) you can read those with OCR now, and if it has embedded text in it you can turn it into a text file with the free app Calibre and bring that up in the regular document reader.

And yes, it can take whole pages as input and (generally) won't be distracted by the English parts - if it is distracted by them you can shrink the recognition area to only include the Chinese parts.

@bjnsharp - we're going to be introducing "dictionary packs" in our next update to let you take advantage of lower dictionary prices even without buying a new bundle. (in retrospect a rather obvious thing that we should have done a while ago)

One thing that works well for PDFs and Pleco OCR is to: Open a PDF, take a screenshot (press the home and power key at the same time), then open the screenshot from the Photo Library using Pleco's OCR Block Recognizer.

@Lechuan...good thinking Ninety-Nine!!