Upcoming Release

Development of Chinese Toolbox READER (CTR) is progressing well. I’m shooting for an August or September 2010 release date.

With the 2010 release of Chinese Toolbox READER, there will be a modest charge for using the program. Hopefully, the program will be truly useful to you, enough so to warrant your support.

Most of the features described below have already been developed. Some are currently in the works, and other features to be included in CTR have not yet been documented here.

The first and most important improvements in CTR 10 are related to the word dictionary. Support for a word dictionary began with CTR 9.2, but it was incomplete. CTR 10 will contain relatively complete word dictionary functionality.

1. Word dictionary shows component words: As you select a word in the reader, the component words appear in the word dictionary window. In this example, 他 of 他們自己 is selected in the reader, and 他們自己 is marked as a single word with a single underline connecting all four characters. 他們自己 appears also in the word dictionary; however, in the word dictionary 他們 is marked as a word and 自己 is marked as another word. (In this example the characters in the word dictionary are all displayed in gray, indicating they’ve been marked as ‘recognizable’.)
   
   
   
2. Drilling down for component word entries: If you click on a character in the word dictionary that is part of a component word, then press the Enter key, that component word is displayed as the main entry in the word dictionary. In the above example, I clicked on 他 in the word dictionary, then pressed Enter. 他們自己 in the word dictionary was replaced with 他們. Now I can see the pronunciation and definition for 他們, as opposed to 他們自己. This is what I refer to as drilling down. It doesn’t matter how complex the original entry is. As long as the word dictionary window displays a word component (two or more consecutive characters underlined), you can drill down further.
   
   
   
3. Reader and dictionary windows better synchronized: The reader and dictionary windows have been better synchronized. For example, if the character selected in the reader is marked as ‘Recognizable’, no character information will appear in the character dictionary. Likewise, if the character is part of a word that’s been marked as ‘Recognizable’, no word information will appear in the word dictionary. Previously, the character and word dictionary windows were NOT updated when a ‘Recognizable’ character or word was selected in the reader. You ended up with one character or word selected in the reader and different character and word information displayed in the respective dictionary windows.
4. Vocabulary list: If you haven’t yet learned the currently displayed word, add it to your vocabulary list by pressing Ctrl-w. Click on the Vocabulary tab just above the reader to display words in your vocabulary list. In the Vocabulary list view below, notice that some characters are displayed in blue and others in gray. The blue characters represent characters that are not yet recognizable. So in addition to learning the meaning of these words, I would also need to learn to recognize the blue, or unrecognizable, characters.
   
   
   
5. Marking words as known (or recognizable): The ability to mark characters as ‘known’ (or recognizable) was included in the first version of Chinese Toolbox FREE. That functionary now exists for words as well. When a word is displayed in the word dictionary, press Ctrl-spacebar to mark that word as ‘recognizable’. The word is added to the ‘Known Words’ list which you can view by clicking on the ‘Known Words’ tab just above the reader. When you mark a word as known, the underlines for all instances of the selected word in the reader are removed. The characters comprising the word appear in the reader with no particular designation. When you encounter this word again in your reading, the word will NOT appear in the word dictionary. However, as with characters, just press the spacebar on a selected character in the reader to view the character and word definitions (if the character really is part of a word). The following screenshot shows my known words. You will notice that with a few words, one of the characters is marked as ‘unknown’ (blue). This indicates that I can usually recognize the characters when they appear together, but I may have difficulty recognizing the individual characters.
   
   
   
6. Choose preferred interface color: You may have noticed that the main interface color is different from previous versions. Actually, you can now set this to be any color you like via the Settings menu.
7. Multi-character selection in reader: The program now supports selection of multiple characters in the reader. In the following screenshot, characters with a very light gray background are characters that have already been read. Characters with a dark gray background have been selected using Ctrl -RightArrow. Once selected, you can press Ctrl-c to copy the selection to the Windows clipboard. Once on the clipboard, copied text can be pasted to any other Windows application supporting the pasting of text.
   
   
   
8. Word dictionary exclusions: The MDBG dictionary used by CTR includes many entries that probably should not exist. However, each one has his/her own opinion of what should be included. CTR will include support for a custom dictionary exclusion list. As an example, in your reading you may come across 一個人 marked as a word in the reader window. You may consider that this should not be included in the dictionary. It means “one person”. In an English dictionary you would never find such an entry; otherwise, you would also need entries for “two people”, “three people”, etc. So in CTR 10 you can select this word and add it to your personal exclusion list. Thereafter, 一個人 will not appear in the reader window as a single word. Of course, you could submit a delete request at the MDBG website, but you don’t know when it would take affect, and someone could add 一個人 again to the public word dictionary at a later date. If you add 一個人 to your custom exclusion list, this term will not be marked as a word even if you update your copy of the MDBG word dictionary file. Your custom exclusion list will still be intact. It will not be affected by word dictionary updates from MDBG.
9. Temporary word dictionary terms or names: Sometimes, certain character combinations need to be added temporarily to the word dictionary (e.g. names of people) only for the duration of the current document. Refer to the following screenshot:
   
   
   
   王利 is a person’s name, but only in the context of the current document. In the reader text, the last character of the name and the character following the name (是) is marked as a word (利是). This should not be the case. A portion of a name should not be designated (through association with a character following the name) as a common word. In CTR 10 you will be able to designate consecutive characters (王利) as being a temporary term or name. In this example, 王利 would be added to the word dictionary temporarily. The next time you paste text into the reader, 王利 would no longer be considered a name or term.
   
10. Word dictionary additions and customization: Like the “word dictionary exclusions” feature, you will be able to maintain local additions and changes to the word dictionary that are not affected by updating (replacing) the word dictionary file.

Other feature improvements will appear in CTR 10 that are not yet documented here. Check back in a few weeks, as this page will probably be updated by then with a more complete description of new features in CTR 10.