Typing problems with Mandarin (traditional)

What I did:
Mandarin typing on my cellphone

What happened:

The issue was recently encountered frequently. Just in case if the support team is not so familiar with Mandarin(traditional), the process of typing is done by first keying in a few phonetic symbols (known as Bopomofo) and than choosing the desired character. To improve efficiency, input of multiple characters at once is available. The example below is me typing 4 characters at once. This process can last for seconds.

However recently i noticed that sometimes while my typing wasn’t finished yet, Agenda consolidates the typing process. The phonetic symbols are printed out before they can turn into Chinese characters. Typing became quite troublesome since the process is frequently interrupted and I have to delete those phonetic symbols manually. The screenshot below is what happened following the former picture.

What I expected:
better optimization for Mandarin typing

Things that might be helpful to know (Agenda version, OS and model, etc):
agenda ver9.1.3 running on iPhone 8, iOS 13.3.1

Sorry for the trouble. We have heard a few reports about Chinese typing in general, not just this particular traditional keyboard.

It would really help us if you could make a little experiment for us that would show the problem. The smaller the better. Just a few steps we can do to see and test the problem.

We don’t speak Chinese, so you may have to be quite explicit about how to do the steps. Perhaps with some screenshots.

Sorry to ask this, but otherwise it is difficult for us to see the issue ourselves. (If it were in English, we could probably figure it out.)

Kind regards,
Drew

Hi

I’ve recorded i brief video with my iPad for demo
(Agenda 9.2 on iPad Pro 10.5, iPadOS 13.3.1)

In this video, I typed the character 水 (water) twice. First the normal typing process and the second showing where the problem is.

I’ve captured some screenshots below and wrote some explanations.

Normal Typing process


step 1 :phonetic symbols

  • Just some background knowledge.
  • There are multiple ways traditional Chinese typing can be done. The most popular way is through Bopomofo. This kind of typing involves two steps .
    1. Choosing the correct set of phonetic symbols .
    2. A combination of phonetic symbols can represent multiple characters. Thus the user must than choose the desired Chinese character form the list
  • In this video, I will be typing the character , the corresponding phonetic symbols are ㄕ ㄨ ㄟ ˇ, marked by red circles.

step 2 : choosing characters

  • After the phonetic symbols are chosen, they appear on the screen with a dark highlight indicating the typing wasn’t completed yet.
  • There’s a row just above the keyboard zone showing the user all available characters to choose from. In this case, I am going to choose the character

step 3 : typing completed

  • After the character i need was chosen, the phonetic symbols disappear and turn into the chosen character

Issue


Step 2 is where things go wrong

  • The typing issue happens at step 2.
  • Basically in Chinese typing there are some occasions where we stop at step 2 for a while ( I’ll explain later why).
  • In the video I repeated typing the same character. This time I paused at step 2 for a few seconds.

The typing process wasn’t completed but the phonetic symbols are printed out

  • After pausing for a few seconds, the phonetic symbols are printed out where they shouldn’t.

Why do we need to stop at step 2

To make typing more efficient, Chinese typing can be done by typing multiple characters at once. So basically we are used to typing at least 2-3 characters in one single input before entering step 3.This results is a prolonged step 2. Thus the issue is frequently encountered. This issue leaves a bunch of phonetic symbols on the screen and cause disruption of normal input.


I’m not sure if this is clear enough to explain the issue to you, please let me know if anything is unclear. As far as i know Chinese simplified typing is not done by this Bopomofo method. They use Pinyin instead. The difference between the two method is that in Pinyin system they use multiple Latin letters to compose a phonetic symbol, I reckon they might still have similar issues because they might end up with some Latin letters showing on their screen before turning into Chinese characters as well.

Thanks!

Excellent explanation! Thank you!

I am going to use this to track down the problem. Stay tuned!

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These instructions were really good. I was able to reproduce and test the issue very easily. I have made a fix, and it will be in the next release, probably early next week.

Thank you for helping us figure this out!

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glad to hear that
looking forward!

Update: We believe to have fixed this in Agenda 9.3, let us know if this is not the case.

Hi

I don’t have ver9.3 available for update on my App Store here, is there some process pending before Apple release the update?

Thanks

We expect to release it within the next few days.

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Hi

I’ve had the latest version installed and it seems to work good on both my iphone and ipad.

Many thanks!

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Great to hear! Thanks for helping us locate this problem.

Kind regards,
Drew

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