Add a tool for inserting vowels with Pinyin tone marks

Question

I'm writing this feature-request this so it gains some traction before I ask it on Meta StackOverflow. That's right, everyone, I need to see that this is wanted by the community so we can ask it there for the actual implementation.

What I think would be useful for our site is something that would help us insert pinyin tone marks. If you have a better idea, propose yours! Vote up the requests you like that are easier to use and nice to look at (design counts!) and vote down those who are the less easy to use.

Answer 1

I wrote a bit of Javascript that converts Pinyin with numbers to pinyin with tone marks. A demo is available on my website: http://shinyandnew.ca/pinyin_fixer.html

To use it, just type in the textarea like this

Ni3 hao3! Ta1 shi4 wo3de nv3peng2you2!

And it outputs

Nĭ hăo! Tā shì wǒde nǚpéngyóu!

The Javascript code on that page should be easy enough to understand and modify. It is currently a bit buggy but the algorithm for modifying a single word that contains pinyin-approved characters is sound.

I propose that this code be added to the markdown editor, perhaps with a flag to turn it on and off, so that it can be used easily while typing. It solves the problem of knowing which letter gets the tone, which characters are used for the tone marks, and how to input ü. It also works with capital letters. With a bit of tweaking it can be enhanced to work properly on letters as the words are typed.

Bugs:

• It rescans the whole text with every keyup/down.
• It doesn't allow you to write anything with the letter v in it.
• While editing text in the middle (as opposed to appending at the end) it causes your cursor to jump around.
• Probably many more.

But these are integration issues that would have to be addressed for the markdown anyway. In fact, maybe it could skip changing what the user is typing and simply apply in a formatting pass, the way bold and italics are applied now. Either way, I present that JavaScript file with its algorithm for use here.

Answer 2

Until this feature gets added to the Stack Exchange engine, Windows users can use pinyinput to type pinyin with tone marks.

Anybody know of an equivalent for GNU/Linux or Mac?

Answer 3

One proposal would be a drop-down menu next to the standard buttons that we can open and then we can click-to-insert the vowels with pinyin tone marks. An example would be like this:

Answer 4

I'd like to propose a variant for Mr Shiny and New tool.

Use the code he wrote but use a Markdown system to activate it. For example if **this** makes this, we could use another symbol to activate the pinyin.

For example writing

Ni3 hao3! $Ta1 shi4 wo3de nv3peng2you2!$

would give

Ni3 hao3! Tā shì wǒde nǚpéngyóu!

Only the text enclosed there would be tranformed, so we can still continue to write normal text as if we wish. :)

Answer 5

You can dump the Chinese into Google translate and see the pinyin with tone marks. There might be a feature in their API to just retrieve that information. Then we could tag anything in characters and have the pinyin automatically added after it.