Outlier Linguistic Solutions

[Mati1]

5 hours ago, OneEye said:

The dictionary has been released. 

Great news!

 

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If you’d like to try the Mini Edition before deciding whether or not to upgrade to one of the full versions (more info about each edition is available here), you can buy the Mini Edition through Pleco’s Add-ons feature starting tomorrow (7 February US time).

I've been wondering for a long time, will it be more expensive (and how much) if going the upgrade route? Because I am interested in the expert edition in the long run. Maybe this question has been answered here on the forum before, if so apologies - I do not read every CF post

[fabiothebest]

Already downloaded.. Thanks

[OneEye]

3 hours ago, Mati1 said:

I've been wondering for a long time, will it be more expensive (and how much) if going the upgrade route? Because I am interested in the expert edition in the long run. Maybe this question has been answered here on the forum before, if so apologies - I do not read every CF post

 

It will be the same price whether you buy the Expert Edition up front or go the upgrade route. For any upgrade, you'll only pay the difference in price between what you've already purchased and what you're upgrading to. So if, for example, you buy the $9.99 Mini Edition now and decide to upgrade to the $59.99 Expert Edition later, you'll pay $50 for the upgrade.

[Mati1]

I tried the mini edition on my Android phone and it works. Then I tried it on an older device with Android 4.3 and the popup windows only show HTML code. Do you know anything about this?

[mikelove]

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I tried the mini edition on my Android phone and it works. Then I tried it on an older device with Android 4.3 and the popup windows only show HTML code. Do you know anything about this?

 

Update to the latest version of Pleco - you're using a slightly out-of-date one. (not so out-of-date that it can't run Outlier at all, which is why you were able to download it, but out-of-date enough that it doesn't support displaying Outlier's popup notes). Latest version is compatible with Android 4.0 and later so you should have no trouble downloading it on your Android 4.3 phone.

[Mati1]

@mikelove It's a fresh Pleco install on my Android 4.3 phone. I doublechecked and both phones use the same version: 3.2.39, Jan. 31, 2017; now newer version in my Play Store.

[Mati1]

I installed Pleco and the new Outlier dictionary on yet another Android phone (4.0.4) and it has the same problem showing HTML code.

[mikelove]

Hmm, seeing this too now - might be a pre-4.4 thing, versions of Android before 4.4 shipped with an utterly awful embedded web browser component that was missing a lot of features modern web designs rely on. Will see if we can come up with a way to transform Outlier's HTML to an old-Android-friendly 'lite' version for people with old phones for our next bug-fix update.

 

(that being said, I would strongly encourage anyone with a device running 4.3 or earlier to do whatever it takes to get it up to 4.4 or a newer version - Android 4.3 is 3-and-a-half years old and riddled with security vulnerabilities, quite a few of them thanks to that bad embedded web browser)

[mikelove]

OK, came up with a quick fix - update will probably be up on beta channel today (also adding rudimentary support for following links in popups), go to https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.pleco.chinesesystem to sign up for that.

[OneEye]

We've sent the data for v1.1 of the Mini Edition of our dictionary to Pleco! There's a lot of new info in this version. Nearly 300 new entries, tons of ancient character forms, and some really cool images showing how some simplified characters derived from shorthand:

 

 

More info here. Should be released very soon!

[OneEye]

v1.1 is now released! As I said before, there's a lot of new info in this version, including a bunch of ancient character forms and some cool images demonstrating how some simplified characters derived from shorthand or cursive, along with a lot more detail in the character explanations for the 500 most frequently-used characters.

 

Screen shots:

 

[Mati1]

Could you improve the popup windows to apply the dark Pleco theme? I guess this would be a Pleco-only internal change.

[mikelove]

That one's a little bit of both - we could add code support for it pretty easily (though we haven't yet), but Outlier would need to come up with Night-themed versions of all of those popups (which are little embedded web pages), including their associated images. I'm sure that'll happen sooner or later, but I suspect right now they'd rather focus their editorial resources on adding new content.

[OneEye]

We released a major update to our character dictionary for Pleco today (official announcement here). The core version of our character dictionary for Pleco, the Essentials Edition, is finally ready!

 

We're running a special deal right now: you can get a free PDF semantic components poster of your choice with a purchase of the dictionary through our website. You'll receive a code for your free poster via email once you've purchased any edition of the dictionary.

 

If you already have a copy of the Mini Edition and want to upgrade, you can do so through Pleco and the price of Mini will be deducted from the price of Essentials. If you'd like to upgrade to the Expert Edition to get access to the new Expert info, get in touch with us.

 

This version of the Essentials Edition contains:

• Full entries for 1000 characters with form explanations (why the character looks the way it does), component breakdowns (what each component's function in that character is), meaning trees (explaining the relationship between the character's form/original meaning and its modern meanings), and stroke order diagrams,
• Abbreviated entries for another 1000 characters (a basic component breakdown with some additional information; to be filled in in a future update),
• More than 400 entries with ancient forms in each version (simplified and traditional; in the next update, all 1000+ completed entries in the Essentials Edition will have ancient forms),
• Short guides in each entry on how to best make use of the information, including video presentations on how Chinese characters work,

A screen shot comparing Mini and Essentials:

 

 

You can order either through Pleco or on our website. Note: if you pre-order the Expert Edition through our website, you get the current version of the Essentials Edition plus the Expert entries. And with any of the editions, of course you'll get all future updates until that edition is completed. The final version of Mini will have 2000 entries, and Essentials will have 4000 entries with much more info in each than Mini, and the final version of Expert will have all 4000 Essentials entries, plus the additional Expert info for all 4000 characters.

[Tomsima]

I've just noticed on your Japanese kanji dictionary kickstarter it says outlier is temporarily providing the dictionary on pleco for backers. I wasnt a backer, but I would gladly invest in the japanese version of the dictionary if we can get it in pleco. So whats the situation - is it available for non-backers to purchase (cant see it on the pleco store anywhere), and is there any chance (PLEASE say yes) that this could be made permanent for all of us 漢字 loving people over on the Chinese side of things? I love comparing pronounciations, and having all the different onyomi/kunyomi readings in-app on pleco would be so good

[mikelove]

As currently negotiated, I'm afraid that's a strictly temporary arrangement - we had a working converter for their data file format anyway so we helped them out ? We don't really consider our app capable enough at Japanese that we would want to take responsibility for people buying / using Japanese content in it.

 

However, you could always format a database of On/Kun readings in our text import format and import it into Pleco as a user dictionary. (we actually even include Unicode's take on those built-in - tap on the gear next to UNI and add JapaneseOn/JapaneseKun to the list of displayed fields)

 

Also, Pleco 4.0 (yes yes yes I know but I've been using it on my phone for months and it's galactically awesome) is pretty much linguistically neutral, aside for a few languages like Arabic that we can't yet support for typographical reasons, and could accommodate a full Japanese dictionary quite happily. We're doing that mostly in order to support a wider range of other-language-to-Chinese dictionaries, but it's certainly conceivable we might eventually support other languages on their own, and it should be quite easy in the meantime for people to make their own intelligently-searchable / nicely-formatted Pleco user dictionaries for Japanese or Minnan or Hungarian or whatever else they feel like.

[kanumo]

Hey,

 

due to this thread, I just downloaded the mini dictionary within Pleco. 

 

I hope my question isn’t too stupid:

 

i would like to go through the list of entry’s within this dictionary, but I am not sure on how to open just this dictionary.

 

i would try to use it as a “learning tool”.

 

thanks for helping me out with this...

[OneEye]

If you want to browse through our dictionary's entries, you can do so by going to Menu > Settings > Manage Dictionaries > Outlier > Browse Dictionary Entries. I'm not sure if there's a way to only display our dictionary in the Dictionary lookup module without deleting or disabling your other dictionaries, but maybe Mike Love has a suggestion.

[kanumo]

Thanks a lot! Found it ?

 

What would you recommend on how to use it as a learning tool?

[mikelove]

If you want to search only Outlier, go into Settings / Manage Dictionary Groups and create a new group (Chinese tab, first option in the popup menu) and then add only Outlier's dictionary to it. You can then tap on the [C] icon in the main dictionary search screen to switch to that Outlier-only group.