Introducing Chinese Text Analyser

[querido]

All the new features are very helpful. Thank you.

[imron]

Version 0.99.5 is now out, and fixes the install problem.

And now version 0.99.5a to fix a problem created by that fix Hopefully all good now - thanks Querido, I knew I could count on you!

[Ruben von Zwack]

I was planning to get CTA ages ago, but life got in my way. Now I am ready, however. Can I just go ahead and play around with the programme, or should I read this topic first? (Please say no, because if I did, that would take up all of my free day!). Should I read certain relevant posts in this topic?

[icebear]

Its pretty straightforward, I think jumping in and then asking questions makes sense.

[roddy]

Imron often tells me he gets a huge kick out of people not reading the instructions - ideally, not even reading the labels on the buttons - and just clicking at random then asking him for help when it doesn't work according to their wildly-unrealistic expectations. I suggest you just play around with it for an hour or two, then leave angry feedback all over the Internet complaining that the character recognition module doesn't work. 

[Ruben von Zwack]

Deal! 

[imron]

The first post is about all you need to understand the basics. Notable features added since then include popup definitions (that automatically mark the word as unknown - because looking up a word, even just to check, is implicit acknowledgement that you don't know the word well enough yet).

Also remember to right click on text and the word list for context menus.

Other than that just read the menu options and explore. There's nothing you can really do that will cause issues for your computer. I hope to start working on proper documentation after adding more advanced word list management sometime in the next release or two.

Don't feel you need to read the entire thread but there are some goodies in there if you read it all.

In the meantime feel free to ask questions you have here.

[Ruben von Zwack]

How do you all deal with words passively known? Treat them like unknown?

 

edit: I realised that's a philosophical, not a technical qestion. And first things come first, so I resorted to trying to understand the "export" dialogue

[imron]

What do you mean by passively known?

[Ruben von Zwack]

Words I can read and pronounce, but where I would make a mistake when handwriting.

Still ploughing through this whole thread page by page. I think I came across a solution to those half-known words, something that realmayo wrote in #44 in regards to segmented words: export an extra list, sit down and learn them properly

[Ruben von Zwack]

I am getting the hang of it. Still reading my way through this topic - interrupted by a night shift at the office - and I am currently at post #71, so sorry if this has been asked before. I want to export a word list. Now, I'm not sure what to make of the dropdown (picture 1). When I choose the empty rider, I can use the filter. It just looks odd so I thought I'd ask.

[imron]

That is a bug, and it should not be empty, it should say 'known'.

I changed the way word lists work in the most recent release, and so added code to convert the old word lists to the new format. It seems however that I have not handled the case where there was no need to convert, and so it's just getting an empty name. I'll fix it in the next release.

[imron]

Words I can read and pronounce, but where I would make a mistake when handwriting.

For me, 'unknown' generally means 'a word I need to study more'. Feel free to be as strict as you like in what that means to you, and you can always automatically have those words marked as known when you export them if you have been overly strict.

My advice would be for any word you're unsure about to err towards unknown. As long as you are doing regular reading and studying of exported lists, it will readily become known.

Remember the goal is not to accumulate the biggest number of known words. The goal is to get an accurate picture of what words you know well and what words require further study.

[Ruben von Zwack]

Another observation:

 

After I exported a word list, CTA asks me if I would like to open it. It opens the word list as a new clipboard and displays numbers >10 as boxes, no matter which font I choose.

In the corresponding .txt file they display fine up to 20, and >20, display them as "1". Admittedly I was looking at a word with a ridiculous amount of meanings like 就. My laptop runs Windows 7, 32 bit, maybe that's relevant.

 

 

This may be a daft question, but what is the purpose of opening the word list as a clipboard in CTA?

 

PS: I should add I find the programme extremely praiseworthy!   I will never ever go back to "hand" reading newspaper articles and prioritising new vocabulary by making pencil lists like IIII, IIII....

 

[imron]

It opens the word list as a new clipboard and displays numbers >10 as boxes, no matter which font I choose.

Keep those bug reports coming

 

Which font are you choosing by the way?  It appears fine for me using SimSun - but then I also have the SimSun-ExtB installed, so I wonder if it's using that as a fallback.  Will try to come up with a nice solution to this.

 

This may be a daft question, but what is the purpose of opening the word list as a clipboard in CTA?

What do you mean by opening the word list as a clipboard?  Do you mean exporting the word list to the clipboard?  That's there to make it easy to copy and paste the list to another program, e.g. export to clipboard and then paste in an email to yourself (this was a requested feature), or export to clipboard and paste to Excel (which will have each field nicely in its own column) and so on.

 

PS: I should add I find the programme extremely praiseworthy!

Most people who use it seem to like it.  I just wish more people would start using it ;-)

[imron]

but what is the purpose of opening the word list as a clipboard in CTA?

Also, if you mean why would you want to open the list after you've exported it, it's a 'poor man's preview' and is a stop-gap until I can implement decent preview functionality in the export dialog.

[Ruben von Zwack]

it's a 'poor man's preview'

I see, thanks!

 

Maybe I misunderstand, but export to the clipboard doesn't seem to do anything on my laptop. Maybe it's easiest to include screenshots (see PDF attached).

I also played around with the fonts, but then I realised it was a bit of a wasted effort until I had one with an obnoxious amount of meanings like 就 in there. So I'll do that again later!

Export and open word Lists - Fonts.pdf

[imron]

Maybe I misunderstand, but export to the clipboard doesn't seem to do anything on my laptop

Directly after exporting to clipboard, open Notepad, and press Ctrl+V.  You should see the word list pasted there.  Likewise for pasting in any other program.

 

Export to clipboard is basically a shortcut for exporting to a file, opening the file, selecting the entire contents of the file and then copying that to the clipboard.

[imron]

Regarding squares, I've had a bit of a look, and it appears to be a bug with the renderer and unknown words.  If you double-click one of those words (to toggle between known and unknown) you'll see that it shows the numbers correctly.  One more bug for the bug list.

[Ruben von Zwack]

I see! Thank you! Just tried and it worked fine with Excel. My misunderstanding was that it'd copy to the program's own clipboard, as the riders are called clipboards (I think). I think misunderstandings like that come from English being my second language.