1GPINYIN(1) General Commands Manual GPINYIN(1)
2
6 gpinyin - use Hanyu Pinyin Chinese in roff
7
9 gpinyin [input-file ...]
10 gpinyin -h
12 gpinyin --help
13 gpinyin -v
15 gpinyin --version
16
18 gpinyin is a preprocessor for groff(1) that facilitates use of the
19 Hanyu Pinyin groff(7) files. Pinyin is a method for writing the Chi‐
20 nese language with the Latin alphabet. The Chinese language consists
21 of more than four hundred syllables, each with one of five different
22 tones. In Pinyin, a syllable is written in the Latin alphabet and a
23 numeric tone indicator can be appended to each syllable.
24 Each input-file is a file name or the hyphen-minus character “-” to
26 indicate that standard input should be read. As usual, the argument
27 “--” can be used in order to force interpretation of all remaining
28 arguments as file names, even if an input-file argument begins with the
29 hyphen-minus character.
30 Pinyin Sections
32 Pinyin sections in groff files are enclosed by two .pinyin requests
33 with different arguments. The starting request is
34 .pinyin start
35 or
36 .pinyin begin
37 and the ending request is
38 .pinyin stop
39 or
40 .pinyin end
41 .
42 Syllables
44 The spoken Chinese language is based on about 411 syllables; see
45 ⟨http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin_table⟩.
46 In Pinyin, each syllable consists of one to six letters from the Latin
48 alphabet; these letters comprise the fifty-two upper- and lowercase
49 letters from the ASCII character set, plus the letter “U” with dieresis
50 (umlaut) in both cases—in other words, the members of the set
51 “[a–zA–ZüÜ]”.
52 In groff input, all ASCII letters are written as themselves. The “u
54 with dieresis” can be written as “\[:u]” in lowercase or “\[:U]” in
55 uppercase. Within .pinyin sections, gpinyin supports the form “ue” for
56 lowercase and the forms “Ue” and “UE” for uppercase.
57 Tones
59 Each syllable has exactly one of five tones. The fifth tone is not
60 explicitly written at all, but each of the first through fourth tones
61 is indicated with a diacritic above a specific vowel within the sylla‐
62 ble.
63 In a gpinyin source file, these tones are written by adding a numeral
65 in the range 0 to 5 after the syllable. The tone numbers 1 to 4 are
66 transformed into accents above vowels in the output. The tone numbers
67 0 and 5 are synonymous.
68 The following table summarizes the tones. Some output devices will not
70 be able to render every output example.
71 Tone Description Diacritic Example Input Example Output
73 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
74 first flat ¯ ma1 mā
75 second rising ´ ma2 má
76 third falling-rising ˇ ma3 mǎ
77 fourth falling ` ma4 mà
78 fifth neutral (none) ma0 ma
79 ma5
80 The neutral tone number can be omitted from a word-final syllable, but
82 not otherwise.
83
85 -h
86 --help Print usage information and exit.
87 -v
89 --version
90 Print version information and exit.
91
93 gpinyin was written by Bernd Warken ⟨<groff-bernd.warken-72@web.de>⟩.
94
96 Useful documents on the World Wide Web related to Pinyin include
97 “Pinyin” (Wikipedia) ⟨http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin⟩,
98 “Pinyin table” (Wikipedia) ⟨http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
99 Pinyin_table⟩,
100 Pinyin to Unicode ⟨http://www.foolsworkshop.com/ptou/index.html⟩,
101 On-line Chinese Tools ⟨http://www.mandarintools.com/⟩,
102 Pinyin.info: a guide to the writing of Mandarin Chinese in
103 romanization ⟨http://www.pinyin.info/index.html⟩,
104 “Where do the tone marks go?” (Pinyin.info) ⟨http://
105 www.pinyin.info/rules/where.html⟩,
106 pinyin.txt from the CJK macro package for TeX ⟨http://
107 git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=cjk.git;a=blob_plain;f=doc/
108 pinyin.txt;hb=HEAD⟩,
109 and
110 pinyin.sty from the CJK macro package for TeX ⟨http://
111 git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=cjk.git;a=blob_plain;f=texinput/p
112 inyin.sty;hb=HEAD⟩.
113 groff(1), grog(1), and groffer(1) explain how to view roff documents.
115 groff(7) and groff_char(7) are comprehensive references covering the
117 language elements of GNU roff and the available glyph repertoire,
118 respectively.
119groff 1.22.4 3 November 2020 GPINYIN(1)