New PDF...

henning
 June 20, 2008, 05:26 AM posted in General Discussion

just found out that after 14 months the PDF-clipboard bug is eventually solved.

But the new PDF surely looks ugly. And it is definately not as helpful as the old one for a printed out version (pinyin without blanks, font size and alignment不到位...).

And: 对我来说 this does not at all make the HTML/text replacable (text-link leads to an empty directory now) - especially as there is still so much potential in the HTML (cf. Carl's CSS-examples).

Other opinions on this?

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pchenery
 June 20, 2008, 05:34 AM

My opinion on the new PDF format:

太乱七八糟了

 

 

 

 

 

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michele
 June 20, 2008, 06:33 AM

hi henning,

reading your post I've thought, well the bug is fixed... actually on my computer it doesn't seem so. I've tried to copy and paste a line of Chinese text from the Pdf. onto a Word page, but it doesn't work at all (it results the same old unreadable mix of messy characters.)

I'm resigned about that... on the other hand, as long as the html version is available, I can accept this situation. I don't know where the example you propose is coming from, ata ny rate it seems quite clean, even though  I guess I'd prefer to see each line of the Chinese text, pinyin, and English  in the overlapping  format, as it is on the current bersion.

I have only  a few words to say about the font in html, that I don't like it to much, because in some  (not very often) case it returns odd versions of the character that put me in some embarass in the very first moment. But is not a major problem, I usually paste on a Word document, and change font to SimSun and use a  quite bigger size too, in order to see them clearly, I also change the Pinyin font (usually an Arial), a little  smaller than the Chinese one, and let the English one to remain the same Times New Roman, if I had my Italian translation I use italic.

Please henning, tell me if on your computer are you able to copy and paste from the pdf, would you?

Thanks, ciao, Michele.

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sweetwatermelon94
 June 20, 2008, 08:22 AM

Copy from PDF and paste to Word etc. still does not work. An interesting fact is that the CP competitors like Melnyk and ChineseLearnOnline don't have this problem.

To me it seems that CP intentionally makes things difficult:

(a) no direct link to text html
(b) no copy & paste in pdfs
(c) bad support of trad. characters

Why????

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henning
 June 20, 2008, 09:20 AM

Obviously the old state has been restored:
The PDF got its old appearance back (good) and the HTML is back also (good). As before C&P does not work anymore, though (bad).

Michele: The example comes from a fellow poddie who showed that by the use of CSS together with HTML you can actually choose whether or not you want to see the Pinyin, choose font sizes & styles, or switch to a tabular format. One could say it is "on your terms".

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sweetwatermelon94
 June 27, 2008, 06:42 AM

ChinesePod: any plans to improve this situation?

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John
 June 27, 2008, 07:36 AM

sweetwatermelon94,

Yes. This kind of thing really warrants much more testing, though, and the recent "new PDF" should never have been released. Unfortunately, a thorough job requires more time.