There are a couple hidden features for those learning Chinese that I'll document here.
Both of these require you have a pinyin column that uses tone NUMBERS, not tone marks. If you try it out and have any suggestions for improvement, you can post here.
Currently, the only way to turn these features on is during the creation of a new deck. If you have an existing deck you want to use, you can export (with statistics) to a cloud location, update with new header (setting) information, and add back as a new deck.
Sample flashcard data:
* | add-pinyin-marks | 2
* | color-chinese | 1-2
Text 1 | Text 2 | Text 3
三 | san1 | three
上午 | shang4 wu3 | morning
下午 | xia4wu3 | afternoon
There are two different settings here:
add-pinyin-marks : if you have a column of pinyin with tone numbers, this setting will display the pinyin with tone marks. A possible advantage: when searching in the card listing, you will use tone numbers, not tone marks. On the header row, the number to the right is the Text # of your pinyin.
color-chinese : This setting will color your Hanzi characters based on tone. This requires you to have the corresponding pinyin (with tone numbers) in another column. (The app doesn’t know tones without your help.). You must use “5” for neutral tone. Pinyin can be with or without spaces. On the header row, the example shows “1-2” to the right. This means that Text 1 is the Hanzi and will be colored using the pinyin in Text 2.
If you import a deck with this color-chinese header, you’ll get a new row in "Global Options" called “Tone Colors”. You can change tone colors here. The current colors should match Pleco’s default. Also note that if you are using a custom layout, you can turn coloring on and off for each side separately, so the question can be without colors, and the answer side can reshow the Chinese, but colored.
To see a working example, search the Shared Library for a deck called "Chinese marks and color example"