Feature request

The Pleco integration is awesome. I would like 1 minor tweak. Currently if I look up a word like 大 I would just get the definition of 大. But this is not useful since the skritter app can already natively give me the definition.

What would really be good is if the app looks up $大 instead of simply 大 as that would give me a bunch of words with 大 in it in Pleco like 半大 and 大不. The value of Pleco is to link me to related words and not just a single definition. The $ is important since without it I cannot get words that contains 大 but does not start with 大.

Seems like a simple change in the code to do this.

This is already how it works on mine... When I click the Pleco button it takes me to Pleco and gives search screen with the single character, and a list of all words containing that character. Perhaps it has to do with your Pleco settings?

Press the blue arrow next to the word and it takes you to that word's place in the dictionary... which usually means all the words with that character in them will be below/above it.

Also, I'm not sure if this is just part of an addon I bought, but you can click the character and press the top most right button to get to the character info screen. From there, you can go to the "words" panel and see all words with that character.

@icebear. Does Pleco give you words that does not start with the character but contains the character elsewhere? I only get a list of words that begins with the character.

The $ change could be made on the Pleco or on the Skritter end - would probably happen faster in Skritter since we're still hard at work on our Big Honking Update and for various Apple-approval-related reasons are not planning to do any more minor ones before that's ready, but if Skritter would prefer not to clutter their still-relatively-manageable list of settings with this, we can certainly look at making it an option in Pleco since we've already gone pretty far down into the excessive-number-of-options rabbit hole anyway.

The character info screen that 戴德辉 mentions is a built-in feature, so you can get to it the same way - tap on a character in an entry and then tap on the 字 button. (in the aforementioned update we're making this about two button taps faster to get into) But just manually typing a $ before the character also works.

Would there by any downsides to searching $大 instead of 大 for single characters?

@mikelove @nick
Thanks for looking into this.
My personal opinion would be to put this as an option in Skritter to enable/disable (or simply keep it permanently on if we don't want option clutter.). However passing $ may not work if in Pleco the user uses the option to redefine this $ to some other wildcard character. So Pleco code may have have something to ignore the user's definition when it gets a message from Skritter app.

I agree it saves 2 button taps. But it feels a little clunky every time I do this.

I really appreciate Skritter and Pleco collaborating in general and for listening to customer feedback in particular. You guys run awesome companies.

Thank you!

The alternate wildcard character option is indeed a problem, though we may be eliminating that soon on iOS (it was mainly designed to deal with weird third-party keyboards, which were a big issue on Windows Mobile and remain a big issue on Android but are not a problem at all on iOS).

A bigger problem is the fact that wildcard searches are a good bit slower than regular searches for common characters - on an older iPhone it could take a second or more to get results for $大, and with the new merged multi-dict search feature in 2.3 it could be 5+ seconds (since we have to read / combine / frequency-sort about 8000 different words containing 大). 2.3 is also much more nicely multithreaded, so you could interrupt that search by clearing it (rather than having to wait for it to finish), and could also configure it to be faster, but for people who prefer to enable that merged dictionary feature for wildcard searches it would be kind of annoying to have $ be the default.

"we can certainly look at making it an option in Pleco since we've already gone pretty far down into the excessive-number-of-options rabbit hole anyway. "

Out of the potential rabbit holes to fall down, it's really not a bad one!

I don't think Skritter will add an option for this, so we will just pick the option that works the best for the most people. It's sounding like that might be the option without the wildcard, but I'm still not sure.

That's what I'd recommend, honestly - we can add an "always wildcard search single characters" option in Pleco that would provide this same behavior, which it sounds like goobybear might be happier with anyway. But it's much easier to have an option in Pleco to enable this than to disable it.

Personally, I'd expect the Pleco button to take me to the word/character that I was studying. I've been using it a lot for example sentences and more detailed definitions on words that have many meanings. One great thing is understanding how trad-simp mapping affects why definitions/pronunciations are often weird. So adding more complex stuff would just confuse people I think. The combo is great currently :)

I'm ok with it being a skritter option vs Pleco option as long as there is a way to enable it.

I'm at the point of studying where it is hard to learn a new character out of context as the English definition of a character does not always capture the nuance of its meaning. Being able to see the character used in various words helps capture that nuance.