Tone and Color Firefox Plugin

[trevelyan]

Are you a visual learner? Popup Chinese has just released a free new Firefox plugin that provides tone colorization for hanzi on any webpage. This is available for installation on the popup page for Chinese learning software

Some people swear by this approach, which was pioneered by Nathan Dummitt in his book Chinese Through Tone & Color.

[Meng Lelan]

Isn't that the same color scheme that MDBG uses?

[spiff]

The link seems to be inactive. Does anyone know if you can change the colour preferences? I learnt to associate tones with colours by using Harold Goodman's lessons (for the Michel Thomas CDs) and so use different associations.

[Guest alexkos]

ok, locate directory called service@popupchinese.com/chrome

there's a file called toneandcolor.jar

open it, it is a zip archive

locate /skin/classic/toneandcolor.css

edit this file, it's pretty visual

don't forget to save and zip

good luck

[spiff]

Thanks. Could you tell me how to locate that directory and file? Do you mean it's on the popupchinese site, and if so, how do I find it?

[Guest alexkos]

no, it must be inside of your computer, in firefox profiles folder

this is how I did it:

I just typed firefox in search and found several folders named firefox

one of them contains my profile, ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles

I don't know what kind of computer you are using, so I recommend to check mozilla manual: http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Profiles

I have a Mac computer, so it's slightly different from PC

Anyway, I made a custom version of add-on which is using Pleco color scheme (red, green, blue, purple)

http://rapidshare.com/files/271176977/tone_and_color_-_popupchinese.com-1.3-fx.xpi.html

download it and use file-open file to install

good luck!

[spiff]

Thanks, that was helpful. After some mucking about, I've got it done. In the unlikely event of anyone else having trouble with this, I'll say where I had trouble (using a mac with Leopard OS X):

Turns out Leopard doesn't search system files by default, and doesn't seem to have anything to extract the files in the .jar file either. So I needed to set up a special search in the Finder to find the toneandcolor.jar file (or use those Firefox instructions to find the profile folder), and then download this developer build of Jar Inspector to edit the .css file inside the toneandcolor.jar file (in the 'Skin/Classic' folder).

Sorted now!