Name

gpinyin - use Hanyu Pinyin Chinese in groff documents

Synopsis

gpinyin [file ...]

gpinyin -h

gpinyin --help

gpinyin -v

gpinyin --version

Description

gpinyin is a preprocessor for groff(1) that facilitates use of Hanyu Pinyin in groff(7) files. Pinyin is a method for writing the Mandarin Chinese language with the Latin alphabet. Mandarin consists of more than four hundred base syllables, each spoken with one of five different tones. Changing the tone applied to the syllable generally alters the meaning of the word it forms. 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 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 a “-”. -h and --help display a usage message, while -v and --version show version information; all exit afterward.

Pinyin sections

Pinyin sections in groff files are enclosed by two .pinyin requests with different arguments. The starting request is

.pinyin start

.pinyin begin

and the ending request is

.pinyin stop

.pinyin end

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.

Tones

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 tone mark table is omitted from this rendering of the man page because the selected output device “html” lacks the character repertoire to display it. Try another output device.]

The neutral tone number can be omitted from a word-final syllable, but not otherwise.

Authors

gpinyin was written by Bernd Warken.