Chinese Hanyu Pinyin Typer, PDF Software Support

Spanish Accents Capslock: I have uploaded PDF and Word versions of the Quick Reference Guide.

Chinese Pinyin Typer: I have uploaded a new program to type romanized Chinese characters with tones. This program is in beta, so it has a descriptive filename, but it is serviceable enough to use. 

Type a1 to get ā, a2 to get á, etc.

Type A1 to get Ā, etc.

Type v0 to get ü, v1 to get ǖ, etc.

Known problems

An extra space is currently created in Word. I may fix this problem in the future, but probably not anytime soon. 

Not all the characters are supported in every program (e.g. a3). This means my program will either type a regular character with no tonal marks, or sometimes will type a misshapen character (e.g. a3) where the tonal mark is oddly placed. This is the fault of those programs, so there is nothing I can do on my end.

Coming Soon:

PDF Copy-Paster: added support for the following PDF software:

• PDF-Xchange Editor
• Nuance Power PDF
• Foxit PhantomPDF
• Foxit Reader (fix)
• many other PDF readers (see below)

In the meantime, I have created a version of the program that will work for any running program, so will work for any unsupported PDF software, though it should be disabled (Ctrl+Shift+D, or right-click system tray icon and click ‘disable’) when you want to copy without all the linebreaks being removed.

á

Blanker (convert text to underlines for fill-in-the-blank worksheets and flashcards) [Beta]

Active recall is a really effective learning technique, and one way I use active recall is with fill-in-the-blank worksheets and flashcards. Fill-in-the-blank is also a good way to work on using context clues for vocabulary.

Replacing the key terms with the right number of underlines is really annoying, so I wrote this script this morning. Simply highlight the text you want to replace with underlines and hit Ctrl+Shift+U. By default, the program will replace alphanumeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) as well as accents in Spanish, German, and French. It will leave all other characters such as spaces and punctuation alone.

This script is still in beta and I’m not sure what to call it yet so for now it’s called “Blanker” and it has a default icon (a white H on green background). If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know! Also, this beta version does not start automatically when your computer boots, so remember to run it first when you want to use the Ctrl+Shift+U hotkey.

EXE file: Blanker.v1.0.exe

Source code: Blanker.v1.0.ahk

Since it’s almost Christmas, here’s a short Christmas-themed example. Do you know all the words?

You better _____ ___! Better not ___! Better not ____!  I’m telling you why, _____ _____ is comin’ to town. He’s making a ____ and checking it twice. He’s going to find out who’s _______or ____. _____ _____ is comin’ to town. He sees when you’re ________. He knows when you’re _____. He knows if you’ve been bad or good. So __ ____ ___ ________ ____!

nice

Esperanto Accents CapsLock (Beta)

This is a little program to type the special characters in Esperanto.

Download here, source code here.

Note: Esperanto’s special characters are rarer than those found in say Spanish. As such, it is only supported by Unicode, not ANSI and other more limited charsets. If you have trouble typing on a certain website or in a certain program, please make sure it’s not that program’s fault before contacting me. You can do this by seeing if other ways of entering Esperanto characters also fail.

French Accents CapsLock (Beta)

This is a long overdue French version of my popular program for typing accents in various European languages.

You can download it here.

French has a particularly large number of different accents, making it hard to include every accent while keeping the program intuitive. Here are the final key combinations I came up with:

PDF Copy-Paster now supports PDF-XChange Viewer

You can download it here.

If you want to learn more about what PDF Copy-Paster does, read my original blog post here.