1gpinyin(1) General Commands Manual gpinyin(1)
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6 gpinyin - use Hanyu Pinyin Chinese in groff documents
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9 gpinyin [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 Hanyu
19 Pinyin in groff(7) files. Pinyin is a method for writing the Mandarin
20 Chinese language with the Latin alphabet. Mandarin consists of more
21 than four hundred base syllables, each spoken with one of five differ‐
22 ent tones. Changing the tone applied to the syllable generally alters
23 the meaning of the word it forms. In Pinyin, a syllable is written in
24 the Latin alphabet and a numeric tone indicator can be appended to each
25 syllable.
26 Each input-file is a file name or the character “-” to indicate that
28 the standard input stream should be read. As usual, the argument “--”
29 can be used in order to force interpretation of all remaining arguments
30 as file names, even if an input-file argument begins with a “-”. -h
31 and --help display a usage message, while -v and --version show version
32 information; all exit afterward.
33 Pinyin sections
35 Pinyin sections in groff files are enclosed by two .pinyin requests
36 with different arguments. The starting request is
37 .pinyin start
38 or
39 .pinyin begin
40 and the ending request is
41 .pinyin stop
42 or
43 .pinyin end
44 .
45 Syllables
47 In Pinyin, each syllable is represented by one to six letters drawn
48 from the fifty-two upper- and lowercase letters of the Unicode basic
49 Latin character set, plus the letter “U” with dieresis (umlaut) in both
50 cases—in other words, the members of the set “[a–zA–ZüÜ]”.
51 In groff input, all basic Latin letters are written as themselves. The
53 “u with dieresis” can be written as “\[:u]” in lowercase or “\[:U]” in
54 uppercase. Within .pinyin sections, gpinyin supports the form “ue” for
55 lowercase and the forms “Ue” and “UE” for uppercase.
56 Tones
58 Each syllable has exactly one of five tones. The fifth tone is not ex‐
59 plicitly written at all, but each of the first through fourth tones is
60 indicated with a diacritic above a specific vowel within the syllable.
61 In a gpinyin source file, these tones are written by adding a numeral
63 in the range 0 to 5 after the syllable. The tone numbers 1 to 4 are
64 transformed into accents above vowels in the output. The tone numbers
65 0 and 5 are synonymous.
66 The tones are written as follows.
68 Tone Description Diacritic Example Input Example Output
70 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
71 first flat ¯ ma1 mā
72 second rising ´ ma2 má
73 third falling-rising ˇ ma3 mǎ
74 fourth falling ` ma4 mà
75 fifth neutral (none) ma0 ma
76 ma5
77 The neutral tone number can be omitted from a word-final syllable, but
79 not otherwise.
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82 gpinyin was written by Bernd Warken ⟨groff-bernd.warken-72@web.de⟩.
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85 Useful documents on the World Wide Web related to Pinyin include
86 Pinyin to Unicode ⟨http://www.foolsworkshop.com/ptou/index.html⟩,
87 On-line Chinese Tools ⟨http://www.mandarintools.com/⟩,
88 Pinyin.info: a guide to the writing of Mandarin Chinese in
89 romanization ⟨http://www.pinyin.info/index.html⟩,
90 “Where do the tone marks go?” ⟨http://www.pinyin.info/rules/
91 where.html⟩,
92 pinyin.txt from the CJK macro package for TeX ⟨http://git.savannah
93 .gnu.org/gitweb/?p=cjk.git;a=blob_plain;f=doc/pinyin.txt;hb=HEAD⟩,
94 and
95 pinyin.sty from the CJK macro package for TeX ⟨http://git.savannah
96 .gnu.org/gitweb/?p=cjk.git;a=blob_plain;f=texinput/pinyin.sty
97 ;hb=HEAD⟩.
98 groff(1) and grog(1) explain how to view roff documents.
100 groff(7) and groff_char(7) are comprehensive references covering the
102 language elements of GNU troff and the available glyph repertoire, re‐
103 spectively.
104groff 1.23.0 2 November 2023 gpinyin(1)