Highlighting new vocabulary in class pdf

Note from a colour blind user - I find these quite difficult to differentiate @AmeNguyen

I wonder if there is another colour we can maybe do these in future?

I like that we are doing this though - nice upgrade.

Has anyone any workarounds for the PDFs being images that are not searchable as text? For instance, I can’t use Zhongzhong to hover over the unknown words to translate them quickly but have to type them out.

凯莉

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Unfortunately not an easy one. I use google lens to take a picture of these words from my phone and then send them to my pc to translate them and obtain the pronunciation. It’s really time consuming and complicates the preparation of classes.

It’s a real pain that starting from HSK4+ all the pdf are now using images instead of words. I reported most of them but so far there is no change to that.

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I agree and would like to know what was the reason for using images in PDFs? It does make studying and class preparation much less efficient than before @Rosie-Cao

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I think @AmeNguyen is in charge of Flexiclass lesson creation now but may be wrong.

From doing proofreading, I know the original lesson file format is PPT, and are text searchable, but when viewed as PDF, they’re not searchable. That’s odd. I don’t know what happened in the transition.

(PS. Please don’t blame me for errors! There is a team of proofreaders made of native speakers of different languages, so different people check every lesson. It is a bit annoying to keep finding issues, I know.)

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What color should we use to be more friendly for all users? Please recommend some

Hi Ben, we don’t use image in PDF actually. We just convert the ppt file to pdf so that all the text won’t move around. I’m not sure why it is not text-based in our PDFs as it is from my side. It would be really helpful that you can give me some examples, or maybe email me at [email protected]

Yes, I am. Thank you for spotting out things. As we don’t make the file image-based on purpose so we will find why it happened and solve it asap

I think it also matters what software the teachers are using when saving the PDFs before uploading. I’ve sent a couple of examples to @AmeNguyen.

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Blue would be clear and stand out the most I think Ame :slight_smile:

I can easily copy the text in the recent Vietnamese files that are dated August 2022, but not in other files. (In particular, the text does NOT copy easily in T151 to T200.) I found come clues in the document properties.

The “good” documents (with easily copied text) have

Application: Acrobat PDFMaker 22 for PowerPoint
PDF Producer: Adobe PDF Library 22.1.201
PDF Version: 1.6 (Acrobat 7.x)
Fast Web View: Yes

Most of them also have an descriptive title such as “T81 Do You Have a Pet …” that I appreciate because it shows up as a useful window title when the file is viewed in Acrobat Reader.

The “not-so-good” documents (with Vietnamese text that I can’t copy) have

Application: Microsoft PowerPoint for Office 365
PDF Producer: Microsoft PowerPoint for Office 365
PDF Version: 1.7 (Acrobat 8.x)
Fast Web View: No
Title: "PowerPoint Presentation" (or, many older files have incorrect title "Đi xem phim")
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Thanks Brett for this information. Maybe that will help LTL to change something. I also have the impression that the problem is “simply” in the latest powerpoint version.

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When I encounter this issue on my Mac, I use TextSniper to OCR text of interest:

There’s a separate application I use on my PC, Capture2Text:

Both work quite well, though Capture2Text is occasionally off by a character or two.

I know these don’t fix the root problem, but perhaps they’ll be useful tools for some.

The whole copy then paste then translate or type then translate or take a photo then send to X then translate or use a scan app to put into… then put it all into your program of choice is, as Antoine said, really time consuming. I mean really time consuming.

It eats up way too many hours that could be spent simply studying and memorizing. Everyone seems to be having to spend so much time trying to figure out how to do it.

The only sane solution is having separate vocab list PDFs. Included in those should be some sentence structure “formulas”. Example for simplicity’s sake: Subject + adverb of frequency + verb.

I realize this will take time for someone at ltl to do, but better than 50 different people trying 50 different ways to get to the same end result that everyone wants… a semi-comprehensive vocabulary list.

Glad to know that some recent files are now easily copied!

A work in progress. :crazy_face:

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@Alexis-Vietnamese-VN_Intro That would be awesome! Each document could cover 25 or 50 lessons.

Someone has put together LTL Anki decks – and Anki is a great learning tool (flash cards) – but I’ve been surprised to discover, at least for Vietnamese, that the decks have no relation to the lessons in Flexiclasses.

@AmeNguyen Is there any update on this?

It was ok to fall on one of these pdf once in a while as it was rare. But now it’s way too much time and energy consuming to prepare lessons without being able to copy or translate easily the characters.

In fact, it’s so frustrating that I’m currently complaining on this forum instead of preparing my class and I would like to emphasize that I had to calm down five minutes before writing you this message. :upside_down_face:

I just checked HSK5+ pdf and it’s the same problem.

Hello everyone, I did some investigation and we will fix all of PDF that are image-based. This will take some time as to check, generate the PDF and upload it. Thank you for all the patience of you guys.
@Brett-Vietnamese-VN Thank you for your research. It really helps me figure out the problem

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@AmeNguyen That’s great news! Also, please check that teachers use a similar process; otherwise, they might accidentally overwrite your “good” documents with image-based PDFs when they add their annotations.

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Yes, thanks for your reminder. After all of the pdf from the system checked, I will sure get all teachers equipped with the right software :wink:

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