Archives for February 2017

Along with today’s 3.2.16 bug-fix update on iOS, we’re also launching a beta test of a massive new update to our built-in PLC dictionary, featuring 40,000 new entries, 12,000 new example sentences, parts of speech for most entries, and many thousands of corrections and bug fixes.

On iOS you can download that beta by just going into Add-ons and clicking on the appropriate download button (“New PLC Beta”) on the main page.

On Android, installing this is a little more complicated (on iOS we’re taking advantage of some code we wrote to support updating built-in databases out of sync with our app, something that’s not really necessary on Android due to the lack of App Review). Download the beta from this link, unzip it, then copy the files inside of it to the /Android/data/com.pleco.chinesesystem/files/bmodules/12/50414345 folder on your device’s SD card, replacing the files that are in there now. (you may want to back those files up to another location first) If that sounds too complicated then just wait a few weeks and the database should be out officially.

The first public release of the Outlier Dictionary of Chinese Characters was just released in Pleco; see this blog post on Outlier’s site for details, or go into the Pleco “Add-ons” screen to purchase it.

Also, check the “Updated” section in Add-ons for a ton of dictionary updates; of particular note:

• CC-Canto just got a whole bunch of new single-character entries; basically, we took the CC-CEDICT entries for around 6000 characters and then rearranged them to add Cantonese-specific meanings and to group meanings with the correct Cantonese pronunciations in 多音字.
• ABC Proverbs now has linked ‘topic’ entries when you tap on a topic; you can also search for topics directly if you turn on “all-caps -> full-width” in Settings / Search Engine and then enter the topic name in all caps. (we also fixed a bunch of broken links)
• Hanyu Da Cidian got Pinyin fixes to around 20,000 entries and traditional character fixes to around 10,000 entries (mostly situations like 別 where there’s a minor traditional variant you would barely notice in a printed book but that would prevent you from searching correctly in an electronic dictionary).
• Grand Ricci got simplified character fixes to about 3,000 entries (a few cases like 内 where we were missing minor simplified variants) and we filled in some missing images in Histoire.
• Das Neue Worterbuch had a *ton* of bug fixes (thanks to our tireless users for submitting many of them) and is now up to something resembling a decent level of quality.
• Cross-Straits got a whole bunch of example sentence bug fixes, Xiandai Hanyu Dacidian a lot of variant entry fixes (no more embedded pronunciations in the middle of entries), and we also made various minor bug fixes / additions to ABC/ABE, both Tuttles, 21st Century, New Century, Adso, HanDeDict, CMT, NWP, Guifan, Lernworterbuch, and the FLTRP DeHan/HanDe/HanXi dictionaries.

Stay tuned for a beta version of our massive new update to PLC which should hopefully be coming next week.