Add tone marks to pinyin with a Firefox extension

[weixiaoma]

A while back, I wrote a Firefox extension that converts pinyin with tone numbers into pinyin with tone marks above the appropriate vowels. It works on MS/Mac/Unix and it's a button that sits in your browser's Add-on bar, so it won't get in your way like an IME would when you don't want it.

For example, if you type “zhong1wen2″ into any plain-text field* in your browser, highlight it and hit the button, then it will be converted into “zhōngwén”. It can also handle conversions of pinyin words mixed into English sentences, such as

Zhu1ge3 Liang4 and Cao2cao1 were famous generals. -> Zhūgě Liàng and Cáo Cāo were famous generals.

The specifics of the conversion process are identical to those of the online pinyin converter on Toshuo, which is also powers the SinoSplice Tooltips plugin for WordPress. There's a quick youtube video showing its usage here:

*On a forum with a rich text editor like this one, you'd have to toggle the edit mode to plain text

[Friedrich]

so has anyone use this yet?

[歐博思]

Watched your video about your program.

zhè biānr, pīnyīnput shì yǐ jīng kě yòng de

dànshì

If you both make it compatible with rich-text editors and allow a customizable hotkey to trigger conversion then I would most definitely give it a try.

[CleverClogs]

I'd be interested to see a slight variation of this add-on: when visiting a website that already has pinyin annotations with tone numbers, I'd like to see them changed into annotations with tone marks. One such site is http://chinesetolearn.com - an outstanding resource with song transcriptions, translations, grammatical annotations and lots of other goodies. It's just that I can't seem to get used to the tone numbers. A few days ago I did submit a suggestion to the owner of the site to switch to tone marks. Still, an add-on that would take care of this transformation on the fly would be a fantastic help while reading articles already written on that site and elsewhere too. What do you think?