Frequently Asked Questions

Shouldn’t Analyser be spelled with a ‘z’?

Not if you use British English spelling, which Chinese Text Analyser does.

Can you add pinyin ruby text above each character?

No. The purpose of Chinese Text Analyser is to help you read without external aid. You will not get to that point if you constantly use an aid such as ruby text. Due to the nature of the Chinese language, choosing the correct pinyin for each character is also a non-trivial problem and prone to errors.

How about colouring characters by tone then?

No. For the same reasons.

Other apps do it..

Chinese Text Analyser is not other apps. These sorts of features can be useful when you are first starting out learning Chinese but one of the goals of Chinese Text Analyser is to help you learn to read and consume native content without external aids. You cannot do that if are constantly relying on such aids.

Can you add automatic dictionary popups on mouseover?

No. Chinese Text Analyser wants to make you consciously aware of when you are relying on a dictionary because that awareness will help you gradually reduce your reliance on such things.

Other apps do it..

See above.

Why are looked up words marked as unknown?

Because if you look up a word in the dictionary then it’s an implicit acknowledgement that you didn’t know the word.

Now maybe you were looking it up ‘just to check’ and you got it right so you think that marking the word as ‘unknown’ is unfair. However, looking it up ‘just to check’ means you weren’t 100% confident in knowing the word, and confidence in knowing the word is just as important as knowing the meaning and pronunciation - at least when it comes to being able to read without external aid.

Chinese Text Analyser takes an uncompromising view that either you know a word or you do not.

There is no middle ground, and no concept of a partially known word, because that’s the standard required in order to read native content without help, and that’s the standard Chinese Text Analyser is trying to hold you to.

But I really *do* know the word, and I don’t like seeing all the words I’ve looked up in a different colour

If you had to look it up, you probably don’t know the word as well as you think you do. The different colour is designed specifically to call your attention to that fact.

Perhaps reflect instead upon why you felt the need to look up that particular word, and think about what needs to happen the next time you see this word so that you don’t need to look it up again.

Hah, I can just export a list of all looked up words and mark all exported words as known to get around this stupid feature

You can, but you’re only defeating yourself.

Are you planning to add flashcard functionality so Chinese Text Analyser can be my one stop learning tool?

Probably not. There are already several excellent tools dedicated to flashcarding, and it’s a better use of development time to improve the core features of Chinese Text Analyser rather than creating yet another flashcarding tool that probably wouldn’t have all the features that other dedicated tools have.

Chinese Text Analyser made a segmentation mistake!

I know. Unfortunately the segmenter used by Chinese Text Analyser is still very basic, and due to the difficulty in parsing Chinese text, even minor improvements to it would take up relatively large amounts of development time, and currently that time is better spent on other features.

We eventually hope to get around to improving segmentation and also allowing users to manually correct segmentation errors.

Which versions of Linux are supported?

The current minimum supported version is Ubuntu 14, running on 32- or 64-bit x86-based CPUs.

Ubuntu 14 is used to build the release version and installer for Chinese Text Analyser, and it’s the version that gets the most testing, but Chinese Text Analyser has also received basic testing on recent versions of the following distributions:

• Fedora
• Linux Mint
• openSuse

using a variety of desktop and window managers (Gnome, KDE, Xfce and JWM).

From a technical point of view it should work on any system that has Qt >= 5.2, and glibc >= 2.19.

If you are having trouble getting Chinese Text Analyser running on your system please contact us, making sure to mention:

• The distribution of Linux you are running
• The desktop and window manager you use
• Your machine type (32/64 bit)
• Information (if any) about missing dependencies

And we’ll try to help you get up and running.

Note however that Qt >= 5.2 and glibc >= 2.19 are hard requirements and Chinese Text Analyser will not be able to run if you don’t have these installed as a minimum.

Why do you use Qt instead of GTK?

We actually started developing the Linux version using GTK, but it was painful and time consuming to program with and so we switched to Qt, which is much nicer to use.

It’s unlikely that there will ever be a native GTK version.

Chinese Text Analyser crashes on Fedora when I try to change the font

This appears to be a known bug with Fedora and Qt’s font selection dialog box when running under a Gnome desktop. You can try using a KDE based desktop, otherwise if you wish to change fonts you will either need to wait until the bug is fixed or manually edit Chinese Text Analyser’s config file to change the display font.

On Linux, Chinese Text Analyser’s config file can usually be found at: ~/.local/share/ChineseTextAnalyser/data/config

Fonts look ugly under Linux

Download and install Google’s Noto Sans CJK fonts. Things will look much better.

On Debian based systems you do this with the following command:

sudo apt-get install -y fonts-noto-cjk

There are similar packages available for other distributions also.

Do you have any plans to open source Chinese Text Analyser?

Not at this point in time.