Copying pinyin from the PDFs

simonpettersson
October 29, 2009, 07:43 PM posted in General Discussion

Does anyone else have this problem? I'm trying to add sentences to my vocabulary tab, so I'm copying them from the PDF into the fields of the "add new word" popup thing in the Vocabulary Manager. But when I paste the pinyin, it comes up all wrong. The accents come after the letters, instead of on them. Like this:

l ˇ 

aop ´ 

o, w ˇ 

o z ` 

ai t ´ 

an h ˇ 

ao jˇı ge xi ` 

angm ` 

u ne.

No matter where I paste it (here, text editor), it looks the same. It also adds lots of line breaks, as you can see.

I'm using a mac with Leopard OSX, surfing with Safari Version 4.0.3.

(This would be less of a problem if there was a "Convert Tone Marks" button in the vocab tool ... )

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go_manly
October 29, 2009, 08:44 PM

I have the same problem pasting from the the PDFs into Word files. It wouldn't be an issue for me if there was Pinyin on the dialog page - the mouseover Pinyin can't be copied.

Perhaps you could open 2 Cpod windows - one on a discussion page, and one where you want to paste the pinyin. Type the pinyin as though you were going to post a comment, convert to tone marks, then cut and paste into your other page.

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John
October 30, 2009, 02:16 AM

The pinyin in the PDF cannot be copied because of the current limitations on the technology we use to generate PDFs.  We have looked at some alternatives recently, but have found nothing viable.

For this reason, we offer the HTML "text" versions of all the PDF files.  There's a link to the text version in the footer of every PDF, and you can also find it by simply changing the ".pdf" file extension in the URL to ".html".

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go_manly
October 30, 2009, 02:30 AM

But John, you can't copy pinyin from the HTML version, so this is not a solution to simon's problem.

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go_manly
October 30, 2009, 03:07 AM

Oops, I just figured out what you meant John. I though you meant the dialog tab. I wish I had known about this a lot earlier.

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simonpettersson
October 30, 2009, 04:10 AM

John:

Ooh! I didn't see that link. Thanks, that works great.

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go_manly
October 30, 2009, 08:11 AM

Actually, there is still an issue here. How can we copy the pinyin from the expansion sentences?

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Tal
October 30, 2009, 08:33 AM

You can't, because they don't have any Pinyin to copy, (except for pop-ups).

You could write your own maybe.

The expansion sentences are considered to be Premium content, so of course they are not included on material made available to Basic subscribers.

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Tal
October 30, 2009, 08:59 AM

Oh wait, actually there is a convenient way you can get Pinyin for expansion sentences. If you download and set up the wlcp software, you can enable Pinyin on the settings (of the 'webpage' you see in your browser when you look at one of the xml files in it.) Then I guess you could copy and paste the Pinyin for the expansion sentences. You have to be a Premium subscriber to do that however.