Pleco 2.0 Instruction Manual : Document Reader
The built-in document reader in Pleco 2.0 helps to streamline the process of reading through Chinese-language documents by making it easy to look up unknown words; you can look up a word in the dictionary simply by tapping on it, instead of having to write it in manually (or wait for Instant Access to launch). It's also integrated with other parts of Pleco, so you search for entries in all of Pleco's built-in dictionaries (even user-created ones), display documents in Chinese on handhelds without Chinese-language support, play audio recordings for words, and even add new words you encounter to your flashcard database.
To launch Pleco's document reader, choose "Open Reader" from the "Modules" menu. To get to that menu on Palm OS, tap on the Menu button at the top right corner of the screen (the rightmost button in the Command Bar); on Windows Mobile, just tap on the "Modules" menu at the bottom of the screen to open it. (you can also assign "Open Reader" to a toolbar button in the Toolbar panel of Preferences). That will bring up this screen:
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Select the type of document you want to open from the Source popup list at the top of the screen:
See the Installing Add-Ons section of the Pleco installation manual (Windows Mobile here, Palm OS here) for information on how to copy document files from your computer to your handheld, including how to convert a text file to PalmDoc format.
On Windows Mobile, right below the Source list is a button labeled "Choose File" - tap on that button to bring up a standard Windows Mobile open dialog, which you can use to select the file you want to open.
On Palm OS, a list of files in the selected format appears below the Source list.
Choose the Chinese character encoding format of the file in the Text Encoding popup list. On Palm OS, any files you create / edit on your Palm or copy in from the clipboard are likely to be in GB-2312 encoding if they're in simplified characters or Big5 if they're in traditional, so select the appropriate one of those and you should be OK. On Windows Mobile, you're more likely to find files in UTF-8 or UTF-16LE. If you pick the wrong encoding, the document will show up as either a bunch of garbled text or a string of meaningless characters; in that case, simply close the document and try again with a different encoding.
The remaining options control the reader's user interface:
Show definition in popup window will cause dictionary definitions to pop up in a separate window instead of being integrated into the main screen; this provides more space for the document text, but makes it a bit more complicated to look up words.
Show Highlight Bar shows a line of text above the dictionary definition that lets you quickly adjust exactly which characters are selected; see Highlight Bar below for more on it. The Magnify option next to it causes characters in the Highlight Bar to appear larger (same size as magnified dictionary headwords).
With Hardware Page Scroll enabled, the up/down direction buttons on your handheld will scroll an entire page at a time instead of just moving the cursor up/down one line of text. Check (only) to hide the page-scroll buttons that normally appear on the side of the screen, saving space.
On Windows Mobile, the Doc Font option adjusts the font size for text in the document, while the Defn Font option adjusts it for text in the accompanying dictionary definitions.
On Palm OS, enable Use large font in document to view the document text with a larger font size, and Use large font in definition to view the dictionary definition with a larger font size.
One other useful configuration option is listed in the Preferences screen instead of in here: enable the "Nav buttons scroll pages in reader" option in the Button Actions section of Preferences and pressing the up/down scroll buttons on your handheld will scroll through pages of text in the document instead of moving the text selection cursor up/down one line.
Once you've finished configuring the reader, tap on the Start button to open the document. Note that very long files in GB or Big5 encoding, or in PalmDoc format, may take a few seconds to open, so don't be alarmed if your handheld momentarily freezes up.
There are two other ways to launch the document reader. The Send to Reader command in the main dictionary interface will open up the document reader on the text of the current dictionary entry, useful when reading through dictionary entries with a lot of characters in them (like those in our Chinese-to-Chinese dictionary). And the Look Up Clipboard / Use Reader options in the External panel of Preferences (Windows Mobile here, Palm OS here) will cause the reader to automatically open when you launch Pleco with a lot of Chinese text in the clipboard. In both of these cases, the display options will reflect however the reader was configured the last time you opened it; you can open the reader, select the options you want and tap Cancel to save the updated settings without having to open a document.
After you open a document in the reader, you'll be presented with this screen:
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Most of the screen is taken up by the Document Text - you can scroll this up or down a page at a time with the Scroll Up 
and Scroll Down 
buttons on the right side of the screen. If you've enabled the "Nav buttons scroll pages in reader" option in the Button Actions section of Preferences, you can also scroll through the document using your handheld's up/down scroll buttons.
Below that is the Definition Field (which may be disabled/hidden) - tap on a word in the document to bring up its definition here. See Looking Up Words below for more on this. Commands configured in the Stylus Actions panel of Preferences will be available here just as in the main dictionary, except for Copy to Input (not possible without an Input Field).
At the bottom right corner of the screen is the Bookmark 
button - tap on this to bookmark the current location in the document, or tap-hold on it to jump to a previously-bookmarked location. See Bookmarks below for more on this.
Next to the Bookmark Button is the Exit button 
- tap on that to exit the document. Pleco will remember your last position in the document and automatically return to it the next time you open it.
Next to that is the Position Indicator (0.00%) - this tells how far along you are in the document (as a percentage of the total length). Tap on it (right on the text, there's no button) to bring up the Jump Position screen, letting you quickly jump to a different location in the document.
The remaining buttons - Switch Dictionary, Play Audio, Add to Flashcards, Prev Entry, and Next Entry - relate to dictionary lookups and are documented here.
In some documents, you may see a popup list at the top of the screen; use that list to quickly jump between document chapters.
To create a bookmark, tap on the Bookmark button in the document reader to bring up this screen:
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Enter the bookmark's name in the Name field.
If you'd like this to replace an existing bookmark (delete that bookmark and create this one instead), select that bookmark from the Replace menu. Each document can have a maximum of 32 bookmarks, so once you hit that limit you'll only be able to create new bookmarks by replacing old ones.
To jump to an existing bookmark, tap-and-hold on the Bookmark button until a menu pops up, then select the bookmark from that menu.
To delete or reorganize your bookmarks, tap-and-hold on the Bookmark button and select "Manage..." from the menu that pops up (it's at the bottom of the menu) to bring up this screen:
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Highlight a bookmark in the list and tap Up or Down to move it up or down in the order; this will determine the order in which bookmarks appear in the popup menu. Tap Delete to delete the bookmark. Tap Done to exit the screen.
Pleco will remember bookmarks for the last 64 documents opened; with more than 64 documents, it'll delete old bookmarks in the order in which the document was last opened (so the bookmarks for the document opened longest ago would be deleted first).
Pleco matches documents to bookmarks based only on the documents' file names; this means that even if you move or add text to the document Pleco should still be able to match it to its bookmarks. Bookmarks are saved as character positions in the document, so if you delete text from it those character positions won't line up anymore and hence the bookmarks will point to random locations in the document (in which case you'll probably want to delete them and start over). If you have two or more documents with the same name, Pleco will think they're the same document (it doesn't have any way to determine that they're not), so the bookmarks from one document will likely translate to random positions in the other one; hence, it's best to make sure that all of the documents you're opening with Pleco have different names.
Tap on the Position Indicator in the document reader to bring up this screen:
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This provides you with several other ways to move around the document.
Enter a number next to % of document length and tap the Go button next to it to jump to the location at that percentage of the document's length.
Enter a number next to Character position and tap the Go button next to that to jump to that exact character position in the document. (note that in UTF-8 documents this is expressed in terms of bytes rather than characters)
Select a bookmark from the popup list next to Bookmark and tap on that Go button to jump to that bookmark. You can also jump to a bookmark by tapping-and-holding on the Bookmark button.
Press the Start button to jump to the start of the document or the End button to jump to the end of the document.
To look up a word in the document reader, simply tap on it; Pleco will highlight the word and bring up its definition in the Definition Field.
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Pleco will look for the longest word as possible beginning at the position you tapped on in the document; in other words, if you tap on the 
in 
, it will look for dictionary entries for before looking for just 
or . If it can only find a single-character match for the character you tapped on, it will try backtracking by one character too, in case the character you tapped on was the second character of a word. If it can't find any multi-character matches it will end by looking for just the single character you tapped on. You can also look up a word by highlighting it, in which case Pleco will look up exactly what you highlighted instead of trying to guess it from the character you tapped on.
Along with looking up words by tapping on or highlighting them, you can also look them up using the hardware direction buttons built into your handheld; press up / down to move the text selection up or down one line, and left/right to move it left or right to the next / previous word. (up/down will be unavailable if you've enabled "Nav buttons scroll pages in reader" option in the Button Actions section of Preferences) Press the center button to shrink the size of the highlight by one character, or if you've enabled the "Show definition in popup window" option, to look up the currently highlighted text in that popup window.
The buttons below the Definition Field control the dictionary in much the same way as the regular dictionary interface; tap Switch Dictionary 
to switch between dictionaries, Play Audio 
to play audio for the current dictionary entry, and Add to Flashcards 
to add the current dictionary entry to your flashcard file. If more than one matching entry was found, you can scroll between them using the Next Entry and Previous Entry buttons.
If you've enabled the Highlight Bar, it will be displayed just above the Definition Field; see below for more on that.
If you've enabled the "Show definition in popup window" option, the definition will display in pretty much the same way, just in a different window:
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The Highlight Bar is always present in this window, since it's the only way to change the text selection without going back to the main document. Tap on the Done button to exit this popup window.
The Highlight Bar provides an easy way to change which text is currently selected in the document reader, along with a way to view a magnified version of the current document text. It consists of a single line of text with two arrow buttons on each side of it:
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The buttons on each side of the bar control the position of that edge of the highlighted text; in other words, tapping on the right arrow button on the right side of the Highlight Bar makes the text selection longer, rather than moving the start of it to the right. More specifically:
You can also tap on or highlight text in the middle of the Highlight Bar to look it up just as in the main document text.
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