Pleco 2.0 Instruction Manual : Version History

Version History

2.0.3

BUGS FIXED

• Fixed a bug that prevented Instant Access taskbar launching from working correctly in Windows Mobile 6.5.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the category selection popup lists in the Organize Flashcards screen to refuse to open up when tapped on on Windows Mobile 6.5.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause the dictionary switch button in the Compounds screen to be blank and the screen itself unusable on systems with only one C-E dictionary installed.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause extra points / lines to be drawn when undoing handwriting input, and added support for recognizing when undoing as well as adding strokes in instant-rec mode.
• Fixed a bug that caused the Windows Mobile flashcard import screen to pop up an error message when the user cancels an import.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused entries listed in the Compounds screen to display examples / definitions / etc in simplified characters even if the software was set to traditional-character mode.
  
• Fixed a bug that caused the Entry List to scroll up by one line when the bottom entry in it was selected and the hardware up button was pressed to scroll the list up to the previous entry.
• Updated SQLite on Windows Mobile yet again; the new version should use a bit less memory and is supposedly also more resistant to database corruption.
  
• Fixed a couple of bugs relating to entry rendering in the new ABC English-Chinese dictionary.
  
• Fixed a bug which caused dictionary entry fields to occasionally remain scrolled down when switching between entries (rather than returning to the top).
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause the "OK" button at the top right corner of the screen to be replaced by an "X" when canceling a flashcard session resume with "allow edits during session" enabled on Windows Mobile.
  
• Restored code which enables alpha instead of numeric input on numeric-keypad-driven Windows Mobile devices like the HTC Touch Dual.
  
• Fixed a bug in flashcard imports that caused entries with trailing (r)s and multiple valid pinyin pronunciations for the same set of characters to occasionally fail to match up with the dictionary entry with correct pronunciation.
  
• Fixed a bug that could sometimes result in duplicate / out-of-order entries appearing in lists of C-E search results.
  
• Updated the Palm OS help screens to reflect the control changes in 2.0.2.

2.0.2

NEW FEATURES

Dictionary Search

• Added a new feature for toneless Pinyin searches of the ABC dictionary: if (and only if) the "match Pinyin exactly" option is enabled in the Query panel of Preferences, when doing a toneless Pinyin (Pinyin-only, not mixed pinyin/characters) search of the ABC dictionary, the results will automatically jump to the entry with an asterisk * next to it, which in ABC indicates that it's the most common entry with this particular Pinyin (without regard to tones) - not a full-fledged frequency sort, but something that might be helpful when you hear a word, don't catch its tones and there's more than one word listed with that Pinyin.
• Full-text searches will now always display results in a list, even if there's only one result available.
• Combined the "Always search in order" and "Search only in current dictionary" preferences options into a single "Search Dictionaries" option - "From Current" is the default behavior, "From First" is equivalent to the old search-in-order and "Current Only" is the equivalent to search-only-in-current dictionary. The two options could never actually be combined (enabling always search in order would disable search only in current) so this just makes that clearer.
• Restored the "1-char results for 1-char search" option to user dictionary searches, since it provides a considerable performance boost in them when enabled.
• Added a preferences option (on the Results screen) to display results of *all* C-E searches in a list, even if there's only one result available.
• Added a new "match search length" setting to the Results panel of Preferences - this lets you customize whether Pleco will prioritize search results which exactly match the length of the search query over longer results, e.g. with "进阶" matching a 4-character entry in ABC et al but a 2-character entry in CEDICT / HanDeDict. With this set to "Always", Pleco will always search all dictionaries for an exact length match before accepting a longer one; with "Never," it'll always accept a match in the current dictionary even if it's the longer than the search query; and with "Non-user only," it'll try to find an exact-length match in fixed / non-editable dictionaries, but will accept a longer match in user-created dictionaries (useful because user dictionaries often don't contain single-character entries for the first characters of multi-character words).
• Gave the language auto-detection setting its own menu, adding a new "Hanzi Only" option which automatically switches languages when you enter a search query with Chinese characters but doesn't do so otherwise.

Input

• Added a "Filter radical results by character set" option to the Input panel of Preferences; enable this to have radical table searches for simplified- or traitional-specific radicals only match characters from the same character set (so the simplified-character speech radical will only give you characters that contain that specific radical and not its traditional-character equivalent).
• Added a new input screen layout option, on Palm OS only, designed to make handwriting input more usable for early Palm Pre adopters. Basically it rearranges the handwriting dialog to have a giant character input box and a couple of extra-large character choices beside it. It also automatically uses the "Instant" recognition option, so characters are recognized after every stroke (no need to tap Recognize). It's enabled via a new "Input Screen Style" option in the Input panel of Preferences, replacing the checkbox for 1.0-style input. There's no Input Field in this dialog, it's one-character-at-a-time as in 1.0, so you'll likely want to assign a hardware button to launch the Input screen in Preferences so that you can get back to it quickly for multi-character entry.
• Made "instant" handwriting recognition the new default on Windows Mobile - performance-wise there's just no reason not to at this point.
• Enabled control resizing in the Input dialog on Windows Mobile, so the controls in there will now expand to fill the available space on portrait / landscape displays (as they already do on Palm).
• Also in the Windows Mobile input dialog, the "left-handed" setting now applies to the placement of the clear / backspace buttons next to the input field, so now those will appear on the left side in left-handed mode (making them easier to hit with a stylus).
• Also on Windows Mobile, upgraded the handwriting "auto-enter" option to highlight the character it's just automatically entered, which means that the handwriting "instant" and auto-enter options can now be combined, allowing you to have the recognizer's best guess about a character appear in the Input Field after each stroke as you draw it. This only works in the Input dialog, however, not yet on the main screen.

Character Info / Popup Definitions

• Added a dictionary switch button to the Character Info Compounds screen.
• Enabled the Character Info Compounds screen for automated resizing on Windows Mobile; lists will now expand to fit the available screen area.
• Added an error message to the Character Info screen when the Unihan database isn't installed.

Audio Playback

• Added support, both on Palm OS and on Windows Mobile, for interrupting audio in mid-playback; this means that if you hit the audio button (or advance to a new flashcard) while a word is in the process of playing, it'll be stopped and the new word will immediately begin playing.
• Added a new, even higher volume setting, "11", on Windows Mobile, to address complaints about volume being too soft even at 10 on some devices; this introduces some extra distortion / lowers quality a bit, however, so it should only be used if you really need it (or are a Spinal Tap fan), and to keep it from being chosen accidentally we've made it selectable only through the Preferences panel (and not through a popup list).
• Added two new options to the audio file set option in the Misc panel of Preferences, "alt (m 1st)" and "alt (f 1st)" - with one of these options selected, the audio will *start* on the selected gender (male or female) for each new vocabulary word or flaschard, but will then flip to the other gender if you play audio again on the same card / vocabulary word.

Flashcard Scoring / Sessions

• Added a "require filled" option to free-answer tests (Tests panel of advanced settings) (also applies in tone practice and stroke order tests) - with this option enabled, free-answer tests will refuse to score your answer until all of the blanks on the current card (or strokes on a stroke order test) are filled in, helpful if you find yourself accidentally tapping the answer button before you're done.
• Relabeled "prompt for answer quality" as "show score buttons" in the scoring panel of flashcard advanced settings, and added a popup list to let you choose the button order - the former "show all" option has now been replaced by three new choices on that list (123456, 654321, and "alternating" for the 2.0.1 behavior of showing 654321 on correct answers and 123456 on incorrect ones).
• Added a "card time" option to the top fields settings in the Display panel of flashcard advanced settings, allowing you to see how long you've been looking at a particular card. The timer stops once the card has been fully revealed, so you can factor in how long you took to answer the card when scoring your answer from 1-6. (this may eventually be linked to an option to auto-advance / mark the card incorrect after a certain time, but for now it's just for your own informational purposes).
• Added a new "head / pron from dictionary" checkbox to the Tests panel of advanced settings; this will cause self-scored (and review-only) cards to pull their headwords / pronunciations from the dictionary entry they link to, preserving (r)s and other bits which get stripped out when they're turned into flashscards.
• Made the definition scroll up / down button assignments in flashcards part of the default preferences set, both on Palm and WM.
• Renamed the "Fwd/Return" button option in the flashcard button actions preferences to "Next/Return" - it actually already would advance you to the next card after answering the current one, but we hadn't labeled it to indicate that.
• Added an extra "reset statistics" item to the flashcard session score-change button popup menu; this not only clears a card's statistics, it also removes it from the pool of cards to study if you're using the new limit-unlearned feature, so it's a convenient way to skip cards in that.

Flashcard Management

• Added a new "Organize Flashcards" screen, bringing back the move / copy-style flashcard management system from 1.0.
• Added a "Merge" button to the "Manage Categories" screen - this replaces "Split" when you select a category that has children, and instead of splitting a category into multiple children it combines all of those children into the parent category.
• Added three more score ranges to the flashcard statistics screen, so that it now evenly doubles all the way up to 204800.
• Added 5-way direction pad support to the flashcard statistics screen on Palm.
• Greatly improved the speed with which flashcard imports can be canceled on Windows Mobile; they should now pretty much always stop on the very next card once you tap "Yes" in the confirmation box, as opposed to continuing on for several dozen or even several hundred cards as they did previously.
• Doubled the maximum number of categories a category can be split into, to 200 - if you want to go further than that we'd suggest splitting twice (i.e., split a category into 5 categories, then split each of those into 200).
• Changed the default flashcard category selector on Palm OS from a popup trigger to a button (since the lack of scrollbars in popup lists on Palm makes them very slow to page through) - now you simply select a category and tap "Default" to make it the default, or select the current default category and tap Default to change the default back to "Uncategorized."
• Added a check to strip newlines out of text in XML imports (they screw up the database in all sorts of ways and until we work around that we're removing them).
• Added a check to strip tab characters from flashcard / user dictionary text definition exports.
• Moved the "store imported defns" option in the Import screen to the "Dict Order" screen, and added a brand new "Definition Source" option - this lets you prioritize whether you want the importer to draw definitions from the file (File Only), dictionaries (Dicts Only), or both (Prefer File to use file definitions when both are available, Prefer Dicts to use dict ones).
• Added a check to ignore score records in imports if their score is blank / set to 0.

Document Reader

• Added an optimization for single-character lookups in the document reader which uses the Unihan database (if installed) to choose the entry with the most common Pinyin if more than one entry is found (so no more 'd's for 'de', etc).
• Made a tweak to the user dictionary search algorithm that should greatly improve the speed and accuracy of user dictionary searches in the document reader.
• Added support for creating bookmarks in clipboard / Send to Reader reader documents, though they won't be saved on exit.

Windows Mobile

• Updated SQLite on Windows Mobile to the latest version, incorporating a number of bug fixes and probably also a modest improvement in startup speed.
• Tweaked the SQLite filesystem code on Windows Mobile to completely lock down any databases that Pleco has open; this should significantly reduce the likelihood of files getting corrupted / otherwise screwed up, and will prevent you from accidentally moving / copying them while Pleco's still running in the background (a bad idea before but now one that we're actually preventing).
• Reduced maximum memory consumption on Windows Mobile by around 20% by shrinking / optimizing a couple of caches - not a huge difference, but might have an impact on stability for some people.
• Enlarged the text in the System ID display field on Windows Mobile to make it easier to read, and added a button to copy the ID to the clipboard.
• Split some of the "Display" preferences panel settings into a separate "Fonts" panel on Windows Mobile.

Palm OS

• Made a tiny tweak to the font rendering code on Palm OS which had a MASSIVE impact on performance - it's literally an order of magnitude faster for long entries, 21st Century entries that used to take 10 or 20 seconds to load can now load in under 2.

• Changed the default directory search paths on Palm to replace "/Program Files/Pleco" with just "/Pleco", to fit better with the directory layout for most Windows Mobile installations.
• Shifted the underline on large Palm OS high-resolution fonts up by 1 pixel, to make it easier to see the bottoms of underlined letters.

Misc

• Added a new preferences option (in Fonts on WM and Display on Palm) to not magnify headwords that are greater than a certain length.
• Added a new option in the display panel to add a newline between the headword / pronunciation / definition sections of each entry.
• Tweaked the GB/Big5 encoding conversion code to do a slightly better job with handling umlauts in Pinyin.
• Tweaked the hardware button assignment screen so that "Clear All" changes to "Clear This" when a button is selected (making it easier to remove a button assignment from just one button), and fixed a bug that prevented Clear All from working correctly in some cases on Palm.

BUGS FIXED

• Fixed a bug that could cause the syllable 'nv' (with an umlaut) to be interpreted incorrectly if placed after another syllable that ended with a vowel but could end with an n (de/den, ma/man, etc).
• Fixed a bug that could cause pinyin where one syllable ended with 'n' and the next syllable began with 'g' to be converted incorrectly in copy-to-input and when importing from tone-marked (instead of numbered) pinyin text.
• Fixed a bug that caused a crash on palm when attempting to open the reader with no document selected (or a blank list of documents).
• Fixed a bug that caused newly-imported cards to have their scores lowered when answered correctly with "scale first increase" selected in the scoring panel of advanced flashcard settings.
• Fixed a bug which caused the statistics screen to double-count cards which appeared in multiple subcategories of given category when retrieving statistics for that category.
• Fixed a bug with the highlight-calculating algorithm for full-text English searches which would sometimes cause it to highlight the start of another word beginning with the search term rather than highlighting the exact search term.
• Fixed a bug that could cause "copy to input" to sometimes fail to look up an entry if that was the last entry you were viewing before backtracking to a previous entry.
• Fixed a bug that made the popup definition screen on Palm always use a small font even when the main definition was set to display with a larger font - now both display with the same size, as on Windows Mobile.
• Fixed a bug that on Palm that could cause text in edit fields to be duplicated after entering the Input screen with some characters already highlighted.
• Fixed a small crashing bug when creating a custom flashcard with a traditional headword and no simplified one.
• Fixed editing cards during sessions so that the cards' definitions will now be updated as soon as you return from the Edit Card screen (rather than waiting until the card is loading again).
• Fixed a bug that prevented user dictionaries from being switched to / selected when performing searches containing multi-character wildcards.
• Updated the clipboard conversion code on Palm OS to use the same Pinyin cleanup code that the rest of Pleco does, so text copied-and-pasted out of Pleco should now have Pinyin tone numbers in the correct locations.
• Applied the same Pinyin-sanitizing improvements to clipboard copies on Palm OS (which use different string-handling code than most of the other parts of Pleco) that we've made recently in other areas, so Pinyin copied to the clipboard should convert to tone numbers more reliably now on Palm.
• Fixed a bug that could cause crashes when importing data from a text file with Chinese characters and nothing else in the Pinyin field / column.
• Fixed a bug that caused cards that had never been reviewed to not be included in "not within" reviewed time filters.
• Added a check to prevent cards from being duplicated in the review of incorrect cards at the end of a session (though if that's set to loop, they'll still show up once on each loop until you get them correct, just as now).
• Fixed a bug on Windows Mobile that prevented main-screen handwriting recognition from working correctly with the Entry List set to fullscreen mode.
• Fixed a bug that prevented flashcard category deletions from also deleting their grandchild (children's children) categories in some cases.
• Fixed a bug that caused crashes on Windows Mobile when deleting categories with grandchildren (even if those grandkids were deleted correctly).
• Fixed a bug that caused the "Back" command to skip the most recently-viewed entry when invoked with a search error ("no matches found," etc) visible.
• Fixed a bug that caused headword characters to be tone-colored in flashcards even if the pronunciation was invisible when the "head / pron from dicts" option was enabled.
• Fixed a bug that could cause crashes (or just very large slowdowns) when searching for invalid strings of Zhuyin characters (syllables that don't exist or that Pleco doesn't recognize).
• Fixed a bug that could cause all flashcards to be exported when exporting only a list of "uncategorized" flashcards.
• Fixed a bug that caused entries arrived at by switching dictionaries without any text in the Input Field to fail to be saved to the back / forward history list.
• Fixed a bug that prevented entries from being saved to the history list when switching dictionaries with the input field blank (no search).
• Reduced the maximum number of saved recent search queries from 100 to 50, in order to work around an issue on Winodws Mobile that limits the size of saved preferences data blocks to 4K; we'll eventually fix this bug in a more definitive way (and restore the larger maximum) but for right now this at least avoids the problem of queries not being saved / getting stuck on an old set..
• Reduced the font size for pinyin answer boxes in flashcard free-answer sessions by 1 point, in order to keep long syllables like "zhuang" from being cut off.
• Greatly increased the intelligence of list rebuilding on the manage / organize cards screens after editing a card. Manage will now only perform a new search if the search query / sort field was potentially affected by the edit (it's not smart enough to distinguish between headword / pron / etc, but if you edit a card and you're searching for cards by category it won't do a whole search again), and organize now only searches again if you edited a card's categories through Card Info. Both screens also restore the previous list top / selection after performing those updates.
• Fixed a bug that caused blank rows to stay highlighted in Manage Cards on Windows Mobile after changing the search type but before searching again.
• Added two more layers of checks to the entry list resize code to make it really really really (really!) difficult to accidentally resize the list to a size of zero.
• Fixed a bug in the document reader that caused Unihan entries to come up as strings of unintelligible text instead of dictionary definitions; that same bug fix also allowed colored headword characters to show up correctly in the reader as they do in other screens.
• Fixed a bug that caused an incorrect error message to appear when attempting to play multi-syllable audio in a demo version of Pleco.
• Added an extra check to the main flashcards screen on Windows Mobile to try to prevent the "OK" button in the corner from turning into an "X" button.
• Fixed a bug on Windows Mobile that could cause the insertion point in an editable text field to jump around when the field got to be long enough that it would contain a scrollbar.
• Added a check to keep the char info and popup entry panels from opening at the same time on WM (which could happen in some rare cases when both were triggered by different Stylus Actions - the second action might process while the first screen was still preparing to load).
• Added the ability for the Windows Mobile installer to remotely exit a running copy of Pleco (before uninstalling). However, this required a change on the device side of things as well, and with earlier versions of Pleco the samne command will actually have the opposite effect (*launching* the software before uninstalling), so we're probably going to wait at least until 2.0.3 before enabling this function in the installer.
• Fixed a bug that caused spaces to be appended to the start of some ABC definitions (noticeable when separating parts of each entry with newlines).
• Reduced memory usage of audio playback on Windows Mobile just a bit more, hopefully it'll make a difference for some people.
• Added an additional memory limiter to SQLite databases on Windows Mobile as well - this should keep Pleco's absolute worst-case memory requirements (800x480 display, every available database installed, lots of flashcards, user dictionaries, both sets of audio, etc) to somewhere in the 6 MB range; if you find this significantly slows things down, though, please let us know.
• Added a check to the flashcard / user dictionary exporter to convert newlines to spaces when exporting in text format (since otherwise you'd end up with a garbled export file).
• Fixed a couple of obscure potential bugs in the flashcard profile setting storage / retrieval code, which in theory might have caused settings to become garbled / fail to save out correctly.
• Updated the Windows Mobile preferences screen button press capture system to work correctly on Windows Mobile 6.5 (one of the few API changes Microsoft has actually told developers about so far).
• Fixed a bug that caused tone coloring in manage / organize flashcards list to be determined by the "Defn" rather than the "List" checkbox in preferences.
• Fixed a bug that caused the flashcard import dialog to go blank / become unresponsive in the case of some errors instead of posting an error message.
• Fixed a *significant* memory leak in flashcard / user dictionary databases on Windows Mobile - each leak wouldn't amount to much, just 40 or 50 bytes, but it could potentially occur once for every card reviewed during a flashcard session, so over long periods of use it could accumulate to a significant amount of wasted memory; could also occur once per card during some batch operations, so there'd be the potential for rapid memory leakage there, and once whenever moving a flashcard to a different category (or changing some other card property) as well.
• Fixed an obscure bug in SQLite on Windows Mobile which could cause an incorrect set of cards to come up when starting a new session under very specific circumstances.
• Fixed a bug which caused full-text C-E searches of 3 or more characters in length to occasionally skip results, mainly in entries containing lots of characters with ambiguous simplified-to-traditional mappings.
• Fixed a bug on Palm OS that could cause some strokes entered in handwriting input to disappear / not register correctly (particularly when drawn very fast or with something going on in the background).
• Updated the finger-friendly handwriting input screen on Palm to always capture SC / TC / Rare, rather than going by whatever the checkboxes were set to when the screen was last opened in 2.0 mode.
• Fixed a bug in both that and the 1.0-style screen which was causing the input field to be cleared whenever you exited by tapping on the Done button.
• Fixed a bug on WM which caused the counter for stroke playback in flashcard stroke order tests to be off by 1.
• Fixed a bug that caused the keyboard focus on the char info compounds screen on WM to fail to switch to the last selected list, making it harder to scroll through each list with hardware scroll buttons.
• Fixed a bug on WM that prevented the Undo command in fullscreen handwriting recognition from resetting correctly when Undo'ing all the way back to where no strokes are visible.

2.0.1

NEW FEATURES

User Dictionaries

• You can now import / export user dictionary entries to/from text files; the format is the same as in MakePlecoDict or a flashcard import, headword<tab>pinyin<tab>definition for Chinese or headword<tab>definition for English.
• Two new buttons added to Manage Dicts, Add New to create a new user dictionary and Configure to change its settings - from the Configure screen, you can edit the dictionary's name and import / export entries from it using the new user dictionary import/export screens.
• Added a Lock function for user dictionaries (accessible through that Configure screen) - this not only prevents the dictionary from being edited, it also generates an extra sort index that allows you to scroll through entries significantly faster (particularly noticeable on Windows Mobile) in large dictionaries.
• Altered the dictionary search result system so that it will no longer switch to a different C-E dictionary if all of the results in the current dictionary are longer than the search query - this means you can now search for multi-character entries in a user dictionary by their first character.
• Added a popup list to the Edit Entry screen which allows you to select which user dictionary a new entry will be saved to.

• "Instant" handwriting recognition option added - select "Instant" from "HWR auto-rec after" in the Input panel of Preferences and the handwriting recognizer will run after every stroke, as on iPhone and in some desktop-based Chinese handwriting systems. (this works much better on WM than on Palm for performance reasons, but we're offering it as an option on both).
• Added French and German keyboard layout options (though only in the main Input screen so far).
• Reintroduced the option to disable handwriting recognizer smoothing on Palm OS (in the Input panel of Preferences).
• Handwriting auto-recognize options (including instant) now apply in flashcard free-answer sessions too.

• Added an option in the External panel of Preferences to include an editable Input Field in the popup entry window (applies to both Instant Access and regular in-software popup entry searches), restoring that functionality from 1.0; Copy to Input and the separate Input screen are supported, except that you can't access the Input screen when in Instant Access mode on Palm due to technical limitations.
• "Popup word" button added in the Components tab of Character Info - use this to bring up the standard popup definition screen on the selected word. You can use the up / down arrow buttons in that screen to scroll through all of the words in the selected list without having to exit and pick a different one.
• Added a field displaying the current character info character's Unicode character code at the bottom of the Char Info dialog (in details mode).
• Added a "Menu" option to the "Sel Action" and "Tap Sel Action" settings in the Stylus Actions section of Preferences, making it more convenient to access a popup menu of text-manipulation options.
• Updated the input fields in the popup definition and Edit Card screens so that they'll behave more like standard dictionary fields in terms of language auto-detection / dictionary switching.
• Added support for hardware scrolling between entries in popup definition windows - this works just like in the main dictionary, it scrolls once you're at the end of the definition.

• Added an "Allow edits" checkbox to the Flashcards panel of Preferences - this allows you to use the "Edit Card" command in Card Info during sessions, and allows you to access other parts of the flashcard system (Manage Cards, Manage Categories, etc) even while a saved session is present.
• Heavily reorganized the flashcard Advanced Settings screen, putting Dicts in a separate screen (accessible by enabling dict remapping and clicking on a button in Display) instead of in its own tab and splitting the former Display and Modes options into Display, Controls, and Tests.
• Moved the repeat-incorrect options to the main Test Setup screen, and the test subject selection option to the Display tab.
• Added an "allow missing sections" option for self-scored tests (Tests tab of Advanced Settings) - with this enabled, even if a card is incomplete / invalid / missing it will still come up during a self-scored (or review-only) test, so you won't see any cards be skipped over or sessions end prematurely.
• Moved the flashcard example sentence display preference to the Display section of Advanced Settings (so it can be set separately for each profile), and added the option to display references to other entries along with example sentences (though these will only be shown if the card is fully revealed).
• Reordered the recognize/undo/clear handwriting recognizer buttons in flash free-answer to put the recognize button nearest to the draw box.
• Hyperlinks now work correctly (with a popup window) in flashcard sessions, though only if the entry is fully revealed.
• The current profile name is now shown in the title of new flashcard session and Advanced Settings dialogs on Palm, though we're not able to put it there on Windows Mobile at the moment due to some bizarre technical limitations.
• Made the "taller" flash self-scored sketch box just a few pixels shorter by default, to squeeze in an extra line of text - go into the Display tab of Advanced Settings and then exit the screen in order to apply the new height.
• Added a check in free-answer pinyin tests to make sure that you've actually entered valid Pinyin in every box before the answer is automatically processed.
• Made the New Session / Start Session buttons the defaults in their respective flashcard dialogs.
• Flipped the order of the recognize / undo / clear buttons in the left-handed handwriting input interface in free-answer flashcards.

• Added an option in Random / Self-scored / Rep-spaced sessions to limit the number of "unlearned" cards to study at any given time. The idea behind this is that you set a threshold at which a card is considered "learned" (also reflected in Statistics), then Pleco will try to keep the number of un-"learned" cards that you're studying at any given time below a certain number; this is handy if you want to add a lot of new flashcards to your study pool but not start working on them all at once. Once you've reviewed a card, even once, it'll be part of your pool of cards to study, so if you're already working on more than the specified number of "unlearned" cards it won't take any away, but it won't introduce any new ones until you've learned enough of them to drop the un-"learned" count below the level you set..
The "prioritize by" option lets you decide how you'd like Pleco to select new cards for you to study - "random" will choose them randomly from all eligible cards, "created" will choose them by the exact order in which they were created, and "approx created" does almost the same thing but will randomly choose between created within a day of each other; this is useful if you've imported a long vocabulary list that happens to be alphabetically ordered (so that cards later in the alphabet would have been "created" a few seconds after earlier cards) and don't want to actually study cards in that exact order (so you don't have to get through all the 'a's before you can start with the 'b's, and so on) .
• Added a new "Difficulty scaling" option to the Scoring panel of Advanced Settings (in Automated mode), with two options, "first increase" and "all decreases". The first option will scale the initial interval (the jump from the default score of 100 to the first score after that) depending on the card's difficulty; if the normal initial interval for your current aggressiveness setting is 400, a card with a difficulty of 100 (the default) would jump to 400 after the first correct answer, but a card with a difficulty of 60 would only jump to 240 (60/100 * 400). The second option will cause scores to only decrease by the same amount they would normally increase when a card is answered incorrectly; normally, when you answer a card incorrectly its score drops all the way back to 100, but with this option enabled, a card that would normally have its score double when answered correctly would instead have its score cut approximately in half.
• Added an option for Random sessions to set a specific "Unlearned card ratio" - with this option enabled, Pleco will configure the pool of cards to come up in each session so that that percentage of the available cards are unlearned and the remaining cards are learned. If there aren't enough cards of a particular type available to maintain the desired ratio, cards will be mixed at the beginning of the session in the correct ratio, then once it runs out of cards of one type it'll continue displaying only cards of the other type.
• Added an option in card selection "Fixed" sessions to sort by score in addition to creation date, and to sort in ascending or descending order.
• Put score-based field selection options on a separate screen, allowing you to choose up to 8 of them instead of the previous 4.
• Added a "show all" option to the "prompt for answer quality" option in the Scoring tab of Advanced Settings - with this selected, you'll see all 6 score choices regardless of whether you remembered a card correctly or incorrectly, and won't be prompted to choose correct or incorrect in Self-scored tests. There are also now separate Score 1 - 6 hardware button assignment options.

• Made the Edit Card screen's dictionary search function behave more like a normal dictionary search interface, adding a clear button and updating it as soon as characters are entered / deleted rather than requiring you to tap on the search button.
• Added a "modified" option to the card filter screen and the manage cards screen, and cards are now marked as modified when their category assignment *or* their text changes, so this will let you search for cards by how recently they've been added to / removed from a new category (though without letting you choose a specific one).
• Added a "duplicate" search option to the manage cards advanced search screen, though note that it's extremely slow at the moment (and won't work correctly if OR'ed together with another search, only if AND'ed).
• Manage cards will now only perform a search on open if it's very simple / fast (all cards, or a category other than uncategorized) - otherwise you have to tap the search button.
• Search results in manage cards will now be cleared as soon as you change the search parameters, and a * will appear in the Search button to indicate that it needs to be tapped to search again; on Windows Mobile the button also blinks.
• Added an option ("w/ cat" or "w/ cat name") in the Flashcards panel of Preferences to display the name of the category to which a newly-created card is added; this comes up *instead of* the "Card Added" message. If the card is a duplicate of an existing card, but it was nonetheless added to a new category (the "Keep Cats" option), an asterisk * will appear before the category name.
• Added a cancel confirmation prompt in exports on WM.
• In flashcard imports that are configured to store imported definitions in the user dictionary, the software will choose which dictionary to store them in from the dictionary priority order for the import, or if it can't find any user dictionaries in there it'll use whichever dictionary is newest.
• Added a "Prompt" option to the duplicate card handling setting in Preferences - with this option, when you try to create a duplicate card a message will come up asking whether you'd like to create it anyway, ignore it but add the existing card to the current default category, or skip it altogether.
• Inverted the text in duplicate card alerts to make it easier to notice them.

• Moved the document reader hardware page scroll option to the "Reader Setup" screen, and added an option to hide the scroll arrow buttons.

• Experimental "Fullscreen" toolbar button option added on Windows Mobile; this hides the taskbar / menu bar in the main dictionary interface. This is currently only accessible through a toolbar button, since we don't yet want to deal with the possibility of people turning fullscreen mode on and not being able to turn it off again, but if you add it to your toolbar in Preferences it'll give you a lot more room on the main screen.
• Dramatically improved the speed at which the main screen is rearranged / redrawn on some Windows Mobile devices - keyboard open/close should be almost instantaneous when before it could take a second or longer.
• Add a check on Windows Mobile to reduce the number of unnecessary screen redraws (speeding up return from most dialogs).
• Preliminary support added for the number pad / Compact QWERTY input methods on newer HTC smartphones; you should now be able to use these to enter characters.
• Improved SQLite support for reading files off of SD cards on Windows Mobile; we still STRONGLY discourage you from putting your flashcards or a user dictionary database you're actually editing on an SD card, since it's very very easy to lose data that way, but dictionaries created by other users (or dictionaries of your own that you're not editing very often) should now be OK to access from a card.
• Improved Windows Mobile file access reliability in general; you should generally no longer find that all your dictionaries suddenly become inaccessible.
• Updated the SQLite library on Windows Mobile - this new version contains several bug fixes along with an optimization that may make certain database queries (e.g. flashcard sessions with a lot of category selections) significantly faster by optimizing the processing of OR clauses.
• Added a preferences option (Input panel) to improve the situation with TouchFlo (on newer HTC Touch series phones) getting in the way of fullscreen handwriting input when looking at a long entry with a scrollbar; with this option enabled, after you enter that first stroke the scrollbar will be disabled, so subsequent strokes will be captured immediately (no tapping on the screen and waiting it for start drawing).
• Added a more user-friendly color picker (a simple window with a color grid) for dictionary icon and tone color selection on Windows Mobile.
• Added shortcut character support in menus on Windows Mobile.
• Tweaked the Windows Mobile automated installer's "Install Add-on" option to allow you to select a card to install the add-on to.
• Added a failed-install end screen in the Windows Mobile automated installer when an install is unsuccessful.

• Added an alert on startup on Palm handhelds running Palm OS versions earlier than 5.2 (which generally can't use Pleco's audio pronunciation feature without being hacked, and sometimes not even then).
• Recalibrated the audio volume scale on Palm so that the first few values are closer together and the later ones are more spread out - 1/2/3/4 are now lower than they were before while 10 is still as loud as ever.
• Added a preferences option on Palm ("Hide insertion point in HWR screen" in the Input panel) to disable the insertion point in the text edit field on the handwriting input screen - this should trick PenPower (at least newer versions of it) into thinking that there's nowhere to input text and hence disabling itself when that screen's open, allowing you to use the built-in handwriting input instead.
• Enabled opening Instant Access with no text selected on Palm when the "Edit box in IA" option is enabled.
• Changed default text encoding on Palm OS to GB, since that's what it was in 1.0 and what it defaults to in CJKOS.
• Revived the idea of automated installation on Palm OS, with a new Palm OS Automated installer using the same system as in 1.0.

• Added alert explaining the "Choose Panel" control the first time you launch preferences; the "Choose Panel" label was also changed to "GO TO PANEL" to make it a bit more obvious, and a "GO TO" was added on the Palm version as well.
• Updated the stroke order / audio demo messages so that they no longer claim the entire program is running in demo mode when only those particular features are.
• Added an actual error message when the handwriting recognizer is not installed, so the software no longer simply ignores the "Recognize" command but actually tells you what's wrong.
• Added an "extended audio detected" note at the bottom of the Paid components list in Ordering if the extended audio files (for at least one speaker) are installed and unlocked.
• Added a volume setting list to the audio play button (in all 3 screens where it appears) - tap-hold on it to select a playback volume.
• Demo dictionaries can now be searched even if you've purchased / unlocked some paid dictionaries; if you select one of them specifically from the dictionary popup menu it should then allow you to search it.
• Changed the sort order of toolbar button options in preferences to match that in the instruction manual / menu bar.

BUGS FIXED

• Fixed crash on startup (which would sometimes look like the software wasn't starting at all) on Windows Mobile 2003 devices, particularly iPAQs.
• Fixed the "No fonts found" startup error on Palm (couldn't detect any files if they were on an SD card in some cases).
• Fixed a crash on Palm in Manage Flashcards when dealing with extremely long (> 32,000 words) lists of flashcards.
• Eliminated the erroneous "some components were missing" error messages on startup.
• Hyperlinks to ABC entries now correctly factor in capitalization (so a capitalized link will go to the appropriate capitalized entry).
• Windows Mobile fullscreen handwriting recognizer lines would sometimes turn gray along with the text.
• Tildes will now copy-and-paste correctly out of definitions.
• The Copy command in the Edit menu now works correctly in the main dictionary screen on Windows Mobile.
• The reader bookmark "Replace" option now actually does what it's supposed to.
• Fixed a memory leak affecting stroke order diagrams on Windows Mobile (potentially causing crashes in very long stroke order sessions).
• Definitions in the Entry List will now appear in traditional characters if you've chosen that option in the interface.
• Self-scored sessions now show correct/incorrect buttons even with scoring set to "None" if you've enabled "repeat incorrect."
• Fixed a bug that caused the flashcard system on palm to exit to the flashcard central screen instead of the main dictionary screen if you save a session, reopen it, and then save it again.
• Fixed a bug which prevented custom flashcard import/export dictionary selections / orders from being applied correctly on palm.
• Fixed a bug which caused flashcard exports to be incorrectly encoded (appear as gibberish) on Palm, mainly when exporting free dictionary definitions.
• Fixed scrollbar in manage cards not updating correctly when hardware scroll buttons used (on palm).
• Fixed a glitch which could cause portions of the screen to fail to update correctly on windows mobile (for example, when closing the start menu).
• Fixed a bug which prevented the entry scroll buttons in the document reader from updating correctly when the screen was resized (palm and wm).
• Fixed a bug which caused the character input screen to take longer to come up than necessary (both on Palm and on WM).
• Fixed a bug which caused cards specifically added to "uncategorized" (via a popup list) to still be added to the default category.
• Fixed a bug which caused duplicated cards to be added to a category even if duplicate handling was set to "Skip" rather than "Keep Cats."
• Fixed the Clear button not working at all in the 1.0-style handwriting input screens on Windows Mobile.
• Fixed a bug on Palm that caused bits of text to sometimes be left behind when clearing a text field if the insertion point was positioned in the middle of the text string.
• Fixed a bug that could cause "AND" and "OR" boxes to come up in manage cards advanced searches even with only one field selected.
• Fixed a bug which caused backspaces to not reset the delay-before-search timer if the "Don't auto-search on backspace" option was set; now, a backspace delays the search until you enter a new character.
• The handwriting auto-rec timer is now reset correctly if you undo a stroke on Palm (as it already was on WM).
• Input Field Compatibility mode now works correctly in the Manage Flashcards screens on Palm.
• Updated the Windows Mobile automated installer to work better with very old versions (3.x) of Microsoft ActiveSync.
• Fixed a couple of bugs with opening Pleco-format documents in the document reader on both Palm and WM.
• Fully fixed (we think) the erroneous "some of the dictionaries or other components you purchased were not found" error message - it should now only come up when that's actually the case.
• Fixed a bug that caused the input field to lose focus on Palm with Input Field Compatibility mode enabled after turning the fullscreen handwriting recognizer OFF, which could cause the Palm's built-in fullscreen handwriting recognition system to fail to kick in in its stead.
• Fixed a bug which caused the scrollbar in the document reader definition to take up much more space than it needed to on palm.
• Fixed a bug which caused instability in saved sessions when testing with "score-based" or "alternating" subject selection and reviewing incorrect cards at the end of the session.
• Fixed a bug on Palm OS that could cause some categories to be erroneously selected / deselected in the new session category selection screen.
• Fixed a bug that could cause problems with some cards in frequency-adjusted sessions becoming inaccessible when those sessions were saved/restored.
• Added a check to flashcard category lists to ensure that the children of each checked category are also checked themselves; this fixes a bug where a category that was newly added to a parent might be un-checked in a category table but still have its cards show up in a session.
• Fixed a bug which caused stroke order flashcard tests to always use simplified characters, regardless of user setting.
• Fixed a bug which prevented the "Trad-only" character set setting from applying correctly in multiple-choice sessions.
• Tweaked the Pinyin handling algorithm slightly to fix cases where words with syllables ending in 'e' followed by syllables beginning with 'r' (like ze2ren2) would end up with the 'r's in the wrong syllable (zer2en2).
• Fixed a bug that caused flashcards to disappear after clicking Cancel in a category removal prompt (on both Palm and WM).
• Changed the default preferences on Palm to leave the Instant Access command bar icon turned off until it's enabled (so that people who aren't using Instant Access won't run into errors when trying to delete Pleco).
• Reworked the settings saving / loading system for flashcard configuration dialogs on Palm to reduce the odds of settings being reset to zero or otherwise garbled.
• Fixed a bug that could cause some popup lists in the Manage Cards Advanced Settings screen to fail to display correctly on square-screen or landscape-oriented WM devices.
• Fixed a bug that caused display issues when switching into / out of fullscreen flashcard sessions on Windows Mobile.
• Fixed a bug in manual flashcard scoring that could occasionally cause a card to have its score both increase and decrease after a single answer.
• Fixed a bug in the flashcard session dictionary remapping code which could cause a mismatch between the Pinyin and definition in some cards.
• Fixed a bug that could cause bits of garbled text to be left behind at the bottom of the screen when scrolling (particularly on Palm OS).
• Fixed a bug that could sometimes cause English-Chinese searches to return a later matching word in cases where more than one entry exactly matched the search query - "go1/go2", "order1/order2", etc.
• Fixed a bug which could cause the difficulty value of a card to decrease twice in the same day in spite of the "only change once per day" option being enabled, if the card's score was already at the minimum possible value.
• Fixed a bug which could cause the Entry List selection to bounce up to the top search result when scrolling thorough it with hardware buttons on Palm OS with Input Field Compatibility mode enabled.
• Fixed a bug on Palm which prevented the "Button only" delay-before-search setting from being saved / restored correctly, and changed the Edit Card / Popup Defn screens so they'll still be able to search (returning results immediately) even when that delay option is enabled.

2.0.0

Initial release of Pleco 2.0 - see the 2.0 New Features guide for a list of major changes.

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