Text Reader

This page describes the new features in the flashcards program version 3.0.

To download the beta of the Windows version (which supports editing the passage of text that the text reader supports, and also supports generating the font files for use with Palm Tungsten), click here.  This download will work on all versions of Windows.

To download the beta of the Palm version of flash (which includes support for the reader, and can take advantage of high resolution displays on newer models of Palm), click here.  This download will work on all models of Palm handheld.

9/08/03: Updated version.  Includes database manager.  Also includes experimental support for breaking reader text into words from your vocabulary list.

10/11/03: Beta refresh.  Minor bugfixes.  Widen various fields in UI to support longer lesson names.

High resolution bitmaps.

One of the nice features of newer Palm handhelds is that they come with a nicer display that can display bitmap images with double the resolution, and with version 3.0 of flash, we now take advantage of some of these new features.  I don't want to bore you with technical details, so let me show you what it looks like:

As you can see, the main difference is that the Chinese characters are much sharper, and much easier to read.  You may also note that Pinyin is now displayed using tone markings instead of having the tone number appended to each syllable.  Thanks to Harald Albrecht for providing help with this.

In order to support this, the Windows version of flash now has options for exporting high-resolution versions of glyphs in the 16x16, 20x20 and 24x24 sizes.  While this essentially amounts to generating glyphs in 32x32, 40x40 and 48x48 sizes, these high resolution fonts won't work with older Palms that do not have the high resolution display.

The zip file containing the Palm version of flash also contains databases containing the high-resolution glyphs for the builtin vocabulary.

In the event that you have a high-resolution display, you do not need to load the files containing the low-resolution glyphs on your handheld.  If you have space constraints on your handheld, you might choose to continue to use the low-resolution fonts, but I should caution that after having viewed the characters in high-resolution, it is difficult to go back.

This functionality has been tested on Palm Tungsten models, and is known to work.  I believe that the Palm Zire 71 also has the same type of display.  I suspect but cannot verify that newer Sony CLIE models running PalmOS 5 will also support this.  The basic requirement is that the handheld must support the high density feature set, which comes with PalmOS 5.  

The bit that I am not sure about is what happens with handhelds that are running PalmOS 4.x and have high resolution screens - I know that Sony used a proprietary library at the time, and it appears to be incompatible with the PalmOS 5 way of doing things.  Despite all of this, I suspect that the high resolution bitmaps can be made to work by using the 3rd party tool v3bhack, which enables older CLIE models to display high-resolution PalmOS 5 bitmaps.

Text reader.

One frequent problem that intermediate and advanced students of Chinese will encounter is that when reading a passage of text that there is a need to keep referring back to a dictionary to look up characters for new words.  In some cases you may find yourself 90% sure that you know the character, and merely wish confirmation.  In other cases you might be completely stuck, and in extreme cases it isn't even clear which radical to index through the dictionary.  Turning to the dictionary can be both frustrating and time consuming, as you can lose your train of thought regarding the meaning of the paragraph while searching the dictionary.

The text reader is basically a feature of the Palm version of the flashcards application that simply displays a block of Chinese text.  In the event that you are unsure as to the identity of a given Chinese character, simply tap on that character, and a popup window will appear that will give the various pinyin pronunciations for that character, and in addition displays the radical that is used for this character.

As the saying goes, a picture is a thousand words (there must be a Chinese idiom for this, but I don't know what it would be offhand).  The reader itself looks something like this:

and when you tap on an individual character, the information you get would look something like:

The Copy and Append buttons will copy/append the character being displayed into the text clipboard.  There are a couple of ways that you can make use of this of course, but the major use that I had in mind when implementing this was that you can bring up the Palm Find application, and paste the clipboard so that you can search for words in the flashcard database that contain this character.   Secondly you might wish to paste the character into the Oxford dictionary and search for words there that contain this character.

For users who wish to use this feature, the first step will be to add the block of text to your lesson files.  The Windows version of flash has been updated so that each lesson in your flashcard database can now include a block of text. 

While you can use the Global IME to enter the text, in reality, entering large amounts of text can be somewhat tedious, especially if there are new characters or if you are unsure of the spelling of the pinyin.  It is more likely that the easiest way to use this would be to either receive blocks of text from an instructor, or alternatively you might clip a news article from a website or other electronic source.

In the event that you are studying by your own, the text editor now includes a builtin text annotator, and is capable of searching a Chinese-English dictionary (in CEDICT format) for new words that you might wish to add to the associated lesson.  Let us say for example that you have found an article on the web that you think might be interesting - you could start by pasting the text of the article into the lesson text for the lesson, and then you can use the annotate feature to optionally add new words to the vocabulary for the lesson.  Once you have done this, you should be ready to go.

When you create the databases to be used on the palm, there will potentially be a pair of databases that contain the vocabulary text (-TGB.pdb and/or -TB5.pdb, depending upon whether you selected simplified, traditional or both characters).  In addition there are 3 fixed databases that come with the flash database that have character and radical information.

This version includes an experimental capability that attempts to identify individual words within the reader text, such that when you tap on a character, it shows you the word that it is a part of.  Only words that are in your user vocabulary database are marked in this fashion.  Note that it is the Windows version of flash that tries to match up individual characters with words in your vocabulary database, and only words from the current or earlier lessons are displayed.

At the time of this writing, the feature is kind of new, and still has some rough edges:

As always, comments are appreciated, especially for the new features.  If there is something that isn't clear, or that I could do better, please feel free to make suggestions for improvement.

For information about bugfixes that are included here, and older versions of flash, click here

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