gpinyin - use Hanyu Pinyin Chinese in groff documents
gpinyin
[input-file ...]
gpinyin -h gpinyin --help
gpinyin -v gpinyin --version
gpinyin is a preprocessor for groff(1) that facilitates use of Hanyu Pinyin in groff(7) files. Pinyin is a method for writing the Chinese language with the Latin alphabet. The Chinese language consists of more than four hundred syllables, each with one of five different tones. In Pinyin, a syllable is written in the Latin alphabet and a numeric tone indicator can be appended to each syllable.
Each input-file is a file name or the hyphen-minus character “-” to indicate that the standard input stream should be read. As usual, the argument “--” can be used in order to force interpretation of all remaining arguments as file names, even if an input-file argument begins with the hyphen-minus character. -h and --help display a usage message, while -v and --version show version information; all exit afterward.
Pinyin sections in groff files are enclosed by two .pinyin requests with different arguments. The starting request is
.pinyin start
or
.pinyin begin
and the ending request is
.pinyin stop
or
.pinyin end
.
The phonetic Chinese language comprises about four hundred syllables. In Pinyin, each syllable is represented by one to six letters drawn from the fifty-two upper- and lowercase letters of the Unicode basic Latin character set, plus the letter “U” with dieresis (umlaut) in both cases—in other words, the members of the set “[a–zA–ZüÜ]”.
In groff input, all basic Latin letters are written as themselves. The “u with dieresis” can be written as “\[:u]” in lowercase or “\[:U]” in uppercase. Within .pinyin sections, gpinyin supports the form “ue” for lowercase and the forms “Ue” and “UE” for uppercase.
Each syllable has exactly one of five tones. The fifth tone is not explicitly written at all, but each of the first through fourth tones is indicated with a diacritic above a specific vowel within the syllable.
In a gpinyin source file, these tones are written by adding a numeral in the range 0 to 5 after the syllable. The tone numbers 1 to 4 are transformed into accents above vowels in the output. The tone numbers 0 and 5 are synonymous.
The following table summarizes the tones. Some output devices will not be able to render every output example.
The neutral tone number can be omitted from a word-final syllable, but not otherwise.
gpinyin was written by Bernd Warken.
Useful documents on the World Wide Web related to Pinyin include
Pinyin
to Unicode,
On-line Chinese
Tools,
Pinyin.info:
a guide to the writing of Mandarin Chinese in
romanization,
“Where
do the tone marks go?”,
pinyin.txt
from the CJK macro package for TeX,
and
pinyin.sty from the CJK macro package for TeX.
groff(1) and grog(1) explain how to view roff documents.
groff(7) and groff_char(7) are comprehensive references covering the language elements of GNU troff and the available glyph repertoire, respectively.