Another feature that people ask for in the zdt is printing. Unfortunately, I havn’t seen too much support for printing in Eclipse so I’m not sure how to do something really nice within the app itself. But since I added this export to any format support, I thought to myself, “Why not export categories to pdf and print from it?” I found an excellent free Java-PDF library called iText and I’ve played around with it a bit. My goal was to output something like the Practical Chinese Reader Character Writing Sheets that I used to use when I was taking classes. Check out the pdf I generated and let me know if you think something like this would be useful. If you’re using Adobe Reader you’ll need to install the Chinese fonts if you havn’t already.
My first thought for this export function was that it should be purely character based. It would take all the individual characters from the specified category and generate a writing sheet from them. Good idea or bad?
March 22nd, 2006
I think it is. 
Josh, has been hard at work porting zdt over to OS X and he finally got it to run today. Awesome.
March 9th, 2006
I’m about to get pretty busy, so I decided to put out a new version of zdt while I have the chance. This release contains a few nice new features, some bug fixes and what I hope is a nicer looking UI through the use of some icons. (Thanks to famfamfam.com for their free icon sets)
Existing users can download the update from here.
New users can download the new release from here.
Now on to the highlights!
Anytone search. The dictionary search supports using the underscore character “_” to match any tone when searching for pinyin. For example, searching for ‘ma_’ will match mā, má, mă, mà and ma. I’ve found it useful for the times when I can’t quite catch the tones while listening to Chinesepod Jenny.
Case insensitive search. Dictionary search for definitions are automatically case insensitive. Now searching for “chinese” will match something.
New Export Wizard. Now when you export a category, a wizard pops up. One of the things it allows is the ability to export to different file formats other then the default zdt one. Currently, VTrain is the only other supported format. However, I made things extensible so new formats should be easy to add. Let me know if there are others you’d like to see.
Flashcards now support sounds. If you have the sound plugin installed, you can play sounds in the different flashcard modes. The new hotkey to play sounds is ‘F3′. This works in the flashcards, category editors, and dictionary view.
Dictionary view UI changes. I got rid of the limitation on the number of results returned. Now any number of results can be returned, and if there are lots of them, there are pagination links at the bottom to help you navigate.
Renaming categories. Small thing, but often requested. You can now rename categories by right-clicking on a category and selecting “Edit category”.
March 8th, 2006