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 in‐
26 dicate that standard input should be read. As usual, the argument “--”
27 can be used in order to force interpretation of all remaining arguments
28 as file names, even if an input-file argument begins with the hyphen-
29 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 up‐
55 percase. 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 ex‐
60 plicitly written at all, but each of the first through fourth tones is
61 indicated with a diacritic above a specific vowel within the syllable.
62 In a gpinyin source file, these tones are written by adding a numeral
64 in the range 0 to 5 after the syllable. The tone numbers 1 to 4 are
65 transformed into accents above vowels in the output. The tone numbers
66 0 and 5 are synonymous.
67 The following table summarizes the tones. Some output devices will not
69 be able to render every output example.
70 Tone Description Diacritic Example Input Example Output
72 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
73 first flat ¯ ma1 mā
74 second rising ´ ma2 má
75 third falling-rising ˇ ma3 mǎ
76 fourth falling ` ma4 mà
77 fifth neutral (none) ma0 ma
78 ma5
79 The neutral tone number can be omitted from a word-final syllable, but
81 not otherwise.
82
84 -h
85 --help Print usage information and exit.
86 -v
88 --version
89 Print version information and exit.
90
92 gpinyin was written by Bernd Warken ⟨<groff-bernd.warken-72@web.de>⟩.
93
95 Useful documents on the World Wide Web related to Pinyin include
96 “Pinyin” (Wikipedia) ⟨http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin⟩,
97 “Pinyin table” (Wikipedia) ⟨http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
98 Pinyin_table⟩,
99 Pinyin to Unicode ⟨http://www.foolsworkshop.com/ptou/index.html⟩,
100 On-line Chinese Tools ⟨http://www.mandarintools.com/⟩,
101 Pinyin.info: a guide to the writing of Mandarin Chinese in
102 romanization ⟨http://www.pinyin.info/index.html⟩,
103 “Where do the tone marks go?” (Pinyin.info) ⟨http://
104 www.pinyin.info/rules/where.html⟩,
105 pinyin.txt from the CJK macro package for TeX ⟨http://
106 git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=cjk.git;a=blob_plain;f=doc/
107 pinyin.txt;hb=HEAD⟩,
108 and
109 pinyin.sty from the CJK macro package for TeX ⟨http://
110 git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=cjk.git;a=blob_plain;f=texinput/p
111 inyin.sty;hb=HEAD⟩.
112 groff(1), grog(1), and groffer(1) explain how to view roff documents.
114 groff(7) and groff_char(7) are comprehensive references covering the
116 language elements of GNU roff and the available glyph repertoire, re‐
117 spectively.
118groff 1.22.4 19 January 2023 GPINYIN(1)