Generating pinyin toolkit definitions after importing

[Friday]

When adding words to my Anki lists, I just type the Chinese into the expression field and the pinyin toolkit does the rest of the work generating definitions, pinyin spelling, and selecting audio samples. However, I'd like to import a long list of Chinese characters into Anki. Is there a way to ask the pinyin toolkit to generate some definitions, pinyin spelling, and audio samples while or after I import this list?

[Olle Linge]

Tools >> Pinyin Toolkit >> Fill Missing Card Data

[Gymnosopher]

As Snigel said, though note it will only do this for empty fields - so if you want everything only import the Hanzi and not any definitions you might already have (unless you want to manually go through deleting these after the import)

[Friday]

Sometimes the definitions field only indicates the word is a surname, even though there are common definitions available. Is there a solution to this or will I have to manually fix every character that happens to be used as a surname?

[Gymnosopher]

In my experience it's been a case of manually fixing, which is a bit of a pain as it would be easier if it gave all the data and then let you delete what you didn't want! I don't know if someone else has a way around it..

So 白 and 马 for instance would come up as surnames rather than white and horse. The same happens for words with multiple pronunciations so 长 is both cháng for long/ etc. and zhǎng for grow/leader etc. This is even more of a nuisance as not only will you need to change the definitions but also the colour, the pinyin and the audio file manually! However the few times that happens doesn't compare with the convenience of most of the time and as you'll likely be changing the definitions to suit your learning (some single characters spit back over 16 definitions!) it's not so bad.

For me, I run cidianreader http://cidianreader.com/ (a free popup reader using the same CE dictionary) at the same time so if I need to change definition I can check with that. You can also checkout Imron's Pinyin IME (to easily switch keyboards to write pinyin) here http://www.chinese-f...ith-tone-marks/ so that if you need to change the pinyin it'll be a breeze rather than hunting for the write tone'd vowel from another flashcard in your deck to copy!

I think this is a problem with the layout of the CE-dict, if the entries were in order of how common they were the surnames wouldn't be the first to get put in!

Of course... Someone else might have an actual solution opposed to my work with what you got approach ;)

[Gymnosopher]

Even better and easier is knowing how to use the inbuilt fixes that don't seem to be on the main website but buried in the github wiki.

Re correcting wrong pinyin:- https://github.com/batterseapower/pinyin-toolkit/wiki/Features:-Smart-Reformatting

This will do coloured pinyin and sound, but not definition or re-colour the coloured character.