manual

Offline

Kimchi Reader is an online-first app. Offline support exists because it's useful sometimes, but it's made for hours, or a few days at most. You're expected to come back online so your progress syncs.

What works

  • The popup dictionary, once you've downloaded it.
  • Documents you saved, from the download menu inside a document. Mobile apps only, since a browser can throw its storage away at any time.
  • Videos you've played once. The first play needs a connection to lemmatize the subtitles. After that it all comes from your own file.
  • Word statuses, highlights, reading progress and sentence mining.
  • The dictionary, hanja and grammar pages, the scratchpad and your settings.

Anything that needs a fresh answer from the server waits: the store, stats, leaderboards, recommendations.

What waits

Progress, highlights, word statuses, study time and mined cards save to the device first. They upload on their own once you're back, so you don't have to do anything.

The sidebar shows how many are waiting. The offline page breaks them down by type and has a "Sync now" button.

What expires

Study time has 5 days. It's saved in short slices as you read, and the server refuses a slice older than that. It's the only real deadline here.

Anything still waiting after 15 days is dropped, and the sidebar tells you when that happens. This isn't made for long stretches offline, so come back online every once in a while. Hopefully you'll never hit that limit.

When a saved copy expires

The lemmatizer keeps improving. A saved copy belongs to the version that parsed it, so when the lemmatizer moves on, that copy goes with it.

The document stays in your list with an Expired badge. You can't open it offline, because there is nothing left to open. Open it once online and it saves itself again.

Videos work the same way. Your subtitles stay, but the parse is deleted, so the video needs one more play with a connection.

An expired entry clears itself after a month. You can also remove it by hand, from the same menu you used to save it.