Pleco 2.0 Instruction Manual : Dictionary Tutorial
This tutorial will take you through the basics of starting and looking up words in Pleco. We hope to post additional tutorials on our website from time to time (and possibly even a video or two), so check back there for more - you can also find lots of useful tips in our discussion forums.
On Windows Mobile, after installing Pleco, go to the Start menu (top left corner of the screen), choose Programs, and tap on the Pleco icon to launch the software. You can ignore other icons like PlecoLaunch and PlecoConverter for now.
On Palm OS, after installing Pleco, go to your Palm's program launcher screen by pressing or tapping on the button / icon with a picture of a house on it. On Treos this is usually located in the row of buttons just below the screen; on the Tungsten T3 / T5 / TX it's located on the screen at the bottom left corner (next to the clock), and on other Palms it's generally located in the silk screened area at the bottom of the screen. Tap on the little menu at the top right corner of the screen and select "All," then scroll down to the icon for "Pleco" and tap on that icon to launch the software. If you see the numbers "1 2 3 4" at the top right corner of the screen instead of a little menu, tap on the "Applications" icon at the top of the screen and the menu should appear. You can ignore other icons like PlecoMover and PlecoConverter for now.
When the demo version first starts up, you'll be presented with this screen:
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You use this ID on our website when purchasing Pleco. You can get it again later by choosing Ordering from the Dict menu (on Windows Mobile) or the About menu (on Palm) - to open up the menu bar in the Palm OS version of Pleco, tap on the menu button at the top right corner of the screen.
To search for a word in the dictionary, simply enter it in the Input Field (highlighted in red):
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To start off, we'll look up the character 
"three" by drawing it on the screen using Pleco's Handwriting Input feature.
To bring up the Handwriting Input screen, tap on the Input button (
) - it's highlighted in blue in the screenshot above. That will take you to this screen:
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Draw a in the box at the bottom right corner of the screen, just as in the above screenshot. Correct stroke order is not required, but helps to make the recognition more accurate - the correct stroke order for is from top-to-bottom (with each stroke going from left-to-right). You can take as long as you like to draw each stroke, there's no timer as in some other Chinese handwriting recognizers. If you make a mistake, tap "Undo" to undo the last stroke drawn or "Clear" to start over from the beginning.
Once you finish drawing the character, tap the Recognize button to run it through Pleco's handwriting recognizer:
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If the recognizer worked correctly, you should see listed among the characters in the box to the left of the drawing box. Tap on that to enter it in the Input Field at the top of the screen:
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If you enter the wrong character, tap on the Backspace (
) button to erase it or the Clear Input (
) button to erase the entire Input Field. You can enter more than one character this way if you like, but you can only draw one character in the box at a time - draw the character, tap Recognize, select it, then draw the next character.
In the demo version, you won't actually be able to enter in the Input Field, but you can practice writing it and other characters on this screen and see if Pleco recognizes your handwriting correctly.
Tap on the OK button at the top right corner of the screen (on Windows Mobile) or the Done button at the bottom right corner of the screen (on Palm OS) to return to the main screen and look up the character you entered:
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You'll notice that has now been transferred to the main Input Field, and several dictionary entries that match it have appeared in the Entry List on the right side of the screen. You can tap on the entries in that list to view them, or press the up/down buttons on the front of your handheld to scroll between dictionary entries.
Try tapping on the Switch Dictionary Button (highlighted in red) - this will show you search results from a different dictionary.
Now we'll try a Pinyin search. We'll look for the character 
"ai4" "love."
Tap on the Clear button () to erase the contents of the Input Field, then tap on the Input Button again and select the Keyboard tab to bring up this screen:
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Type "ai4" on that keyboard to enter it into the Input Field:
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Pleco uses a number after each syllable to indicate its tone, 1 for first tone, 2 for second, etc. You can also enter Pinyin without tones if you prefer; use apostrophes for ambiguous syllables, like “xian” versus “xi’an.”
Tap the OK or Done button again to return to the main screen and view the search results:
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If your handheld has a built-in or onscreen keyboard, you can also use that to enter Pinyin searches; just type them in and they'll show up in the main Input Field, there's no need to go to the Input Screen.
You might notice that the List Mode button (highlighted in red) has changed from a (
) to a (
) character; this indicates that you're looking at a list of search results instead of the entire dictionary. Pleco switches it into this mode whenever it turns up more than one result for a search.
Tap on the dictionary entry for (if it's not already selected), then tap on that List Mode button to change the screen like this:
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This shows you all of the entries in the dictionary beginning with .
Pleco also lets you enter more than one Pinyin syllable at a time. Tap on the Input Button again, go back into the Keyboard tab and type "qing2," so that the full search query is "ai4qing2." Tap done/OK again and you'll be taken immediately to the dictionary entry for 
. You don't need to look up ai4 by itself first, we just did that for the tutorial - if you simply enter a Pinyin word in the Input Field Pleco will look it up without any extra steps.
Another way to look up characters in Pleco is to search for them by their radical; we'll use that to look up the character 
"an1" "peace." Tap on the Clear Button again, then the Input Button, then select the Radical tab to bring up this screen:
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Tap on the box next to "Radical:" at the top of the screen to choose a radical. Then, tap on the pop-up menu next to "Strokes:" and select "3" to jump to radicals containing 3 strokes. Look for the radical 
and tap on it to select it and bring up a list of characters containing the radical .
Scroll through that list and you should see the character among the first few choices (probably in the first or second row) - tap on it to enter it into the Input Field.
Tap the OK or Done button once again to return to the main screen and view the search results:
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You can also combine characters and Pinyin in a single search. Without tapping the Clear Button this time, tap on the Input Button again, select the Keyboard tab, and type "jing" after that character, then tap Done or OK:
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This is an important feature – you can use it to search for a word more quickly if you already recognize one character in it. You can search for a character followed by a Pinyin syllable or for a Pinyin syllable followed by a character.
Along with looking up Chinese words in Pleco, you can also look up English words to get their Chinese translations. Tap Clear to clear the Input Field, then go to the Input Screen, select the Keyboard tab, tap on the popup menu at the bottom left corner of the screen and select "English." (this does not control what language Pleco is searching in, it only controls which keys show up on the keyboard - with Pinyin there's a slightly different set because of the umlaut character)
Type "apple" on the keyboard, then tap Done / OK to return to the main screen:
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As in Chinese searches, you can scroll through dictionary entries in the Entry List and look for results in other dictionaries with the Switch Dictionary button.
Pleco will attempt to automatically detect whether the word you entered is in English or Chinese. However, some words, like "ban," are both valid English and valid Pinyin; Pleco looks up those words in whatever language you were using last. To switch languages, tap on the Switch Language button (highlighted in red in the above screenshot) to toggle between English (
) and Chinese (
) searches.
Note that except in Full-Text searches (see below), the Switch Dictionary Button only switches between dictionaries in the current search language; you have to tap on the Switch Language button to view dictionaries in the other language.
One more interesting search feature is Full-Text search; you can use this to search for Chinese or English words that appear anywhere in a dictionary entry (not just in headwords).
Without clearing "apple" from the Input Field, choose "Full-text Search" from the "Dict" menu in your handheld's menu bar. On Windows Mobile, tap on the "Dict" menu at the bottom left corner of the screen, then select the "Dict" submenu and "Full-text search." On Palm OS, tap on the Menu button at the top right corner of the screen and select "Full-text Search" from the "Dict" menu. This will add a "#" character before "apple" and switch the screen to look like this:
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This will show you all of the dictionary entries that contain the word "apple" - "apple" will be highlighted in each entry when you select it. This works with both English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to-English dictionaries; tap on the Switch Dictionary button to switch between them. Tap on the Switch Language or the Clear button to exit full-text search.
You can also enter that # using your handheld's built-in keyboard if you want to avoid having to go to the menu bar - just type it at the start of the search.
Search for 
"bei3" "north" using a handwriting, pinyin, or radical search, and once you've found it, tap on the Audio button (
) at the top of the screen to hear an audio recording for it. In the demo version of Pleco this feature is limited to single-syllable words, but in the paid version you can use it with any word; if Pleco doesn't have an exact recording for that word, it will play each of the individual syllables in it instead. (it does this without applying the standard transformations for bu, yi, etc - you can tell it's playing the word syllable-by-syllable by the long pauses between syllables)
Tap on the downward-pointing triangle (
) just to the right of the Input Field to bring up the Recent Query List, a list of your recently-entered search queries:
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Scroll through this list back to "ai4" and select it to jump back to the search results for "ai4."
Select the entry for again, then highlight the word "love" in the definition by dragging the stylus over it or double-tapping on it:
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Now tap on the Copy to Input Field button (
), located to the right of the Input Field. This will copy the highlighted text to the Input Field and immediately look it up in the dictionary:
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Tap on the Back button (
) to jump right back to the entry for that you were looking at before.
The difference between the Back button and the Recent Query List is that the Back button jumps you back to a previously-viewed dictionary entry, without changing the current search query, while the Recent Query List jumps you back to an entire set of search results - use the Recent Query List to re-do a search and the Back button to quickly jump back to a specific dictionary entry you were looking at before.
Without moving away from , tap on the Character Set button (
) - this switches Pleco into traditional character mode. You can search for characters in either simplified or traditional regardless of what mode Pleco is in; the Character Set button only affects how Pleco displays characters. Pleco displays both the simplified and the traditional versions of characters in headwords if they differ; for example has its traditional variant [
] shown after it.
Tap on the character in the dictionary headword to pop up the Character Info screen:
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This is a quick way to look up the pronunciation and definition of a single character. You can also get the character's stroke order by selecting the Stroke Order tab (not available in the demo version):
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Tap on the Play button (
) to show an animation of the character's stroke order. The Forward button (
) steps forward one stroke at a time.
There's also a Components tab - you can tap on that to view a list of all of the characters that start with or contain the selected character.
Tap the Done or OK button to return to the main screen.
That concludes this tour of the basic features of Pleco 2.0. You can continue on to the Flashcards Tutorial, or browse the Reference Manual for more detailed information - some interesting features not covered in this tutorial are the Input Palette, allowing you to type / handwrite characters right on the main dictionary screen; Wildcard searches; Send to Reader, which lets you bring up a Chinese-character-heavy dictionary entry (like one from the 21st Century or Guifan dictionaries) in Pleco's built-in document reader to make it easy to look up unknown words in it, and Instant Access, which lets you look up the meanings of Chinese characters elsewhere on your handheld (e.g. in web pages and text messages).
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