Repository navigation
Hold down on a suggested character to view its stroke order #18
Description
This project is amazing; as far as I know, you're breaking new ground with libre Simplified Chinese keyboards. Only I've typed in Pinyin for too long, so these stroke orders will take getting used to...
This is a learning opportunity, though. As a resource for education on stroke keyboards, a quick method of viewing the strokes that make up a character would be greatly appreciated, such as the above.
Activity
yawnoc commentedon Oct 17, 2024
Nice feature request! I've been brainstorming some ideas, and would welcome any suggestions/improvements.
Firstly I've concluded that Toast display of strokes is bad, both because they are ephemeral and because they get truncated.
So my idea is that, when a candidate is long-pressed, a popup appears over the main keyboard area to show the strokes of characters.
Use cases
1. Long-pressing a candidate given a partial stroke sequence
E.g. long-pressing 些 given a partial stroke sequence of ㇑㇐㇑㇐ or
2121:Sample mock-up (better colours will be used):
2. Long-pressing a phrase completion
E.g. Long-pressing 可小 (a phrase completion of 可大):
Sample mock-up (better colours will be used):
Notes for use case 1
些 is defined as
(215|2121)(15|35|53)11, to allow for leniency in the strokes of the components 止 and 匕.Currently I'm thinking that the displayed results should be filtered for consistency with the partial stroke sequence. For example, in the case of 些 with partial stroke sequence
2121, the stroke sequences beginning with215should be omitted.Currently I'm leaning towards wrapping long stroke sequences (rather than horizontal scrolling) for overflow. The longest stroke sequence recorded is for U+4A3B 䨻 (four thunders), which has 52 strokes.
Currently I'm thinking there should be colour difference within the stroke sequence of each displayed result, to distinguish the portion that matches the partial stroke sequence already entered.
Open questions
4135221(1515|1535|1553|3535|5353)1(25|45)2(1111|4134|4444)34(152|154|454), so there are5 * 2 * 3 * 3 = 90possible sequences in total.SunnyWebeSimile commentedon Oct 19, 2024
I'll admit I did not consider the sheer number of strokes in Traditional Chinese characters when this idea came to me. Still, I see a way to improve:
Firstly, I would move the stroke order popup above the keyboard. This would allow users to type while following the character order. Covering more of the screen should not be an issue; the current progress in typing the character is already shown by the keyboard.
The display should update automatically by default, but an option can be added to the app to turn the updates off, as well as disable 'learning mode' altogether.
Automatic updates would facilitate a potential solution to displaying too many stroke combinations: strokes may be shown up to the last characer before the second next set of lenient strokes, cut off by an ellipsis. This way we won't have to show multiple lenient sequences, avoiding the multiplicative effect on displayed entries.
The lenient strokes can be colored differently for clarity.
The strokes of your 䴫 character would be shown initially as the following:
MattHoward-GH commentedon Sep 17, 2026
An interesting discussion, I was thinking this same functionality would be useful as well. At the moment I usually use Pleco to look up the character and check out the stroke sequence, in some cases I would have to press each of the 5 stroke types and see which one allows the character to remain in the suggested bar.
I was also thinking of opening an issue on this topic (before I noticed this issue) but thought that this might be too complex to include in the keyboard itself, thinking a seperate app for doing this conversion might be a more appropriate solution.
Also I guess if 'four thunders' is the largest character then there's no way to type my favourite noodles biángbiáng miàn! 😜
yawnoc commentedon Sep 18, 2026
Here's a very rudimentary lookup page that I hacked together just now: https://stroke-input.github.io/lookup/
It's far from what's asked for here, but at least there is now a reference that is 100% aligned with the data used in the keyboard app.
Note that the filter is extremely slow. Native browser find (Ctrl+F) is somewhat tolerable after waiting for the page (> 6MB) to load completely.
MattHoward-GH commentedon Sep 22, 2026
That's great thanks! 😄
MattHoward-GH commentedon Oct 5, 2026
Oh wow, after the latest update I can actually type 𰻞𰻞面!
Thanks @yawnoc 😁