Here is a little tip for people who go to Chinese websites often and find it tiring because they don’t know how to pronounce a lot of characters.
For a long time I used to copy text from Chinese websites, paste it to a Word document and then switched the Chinese font to one with phonetic symbols (Po Bo Mo Fo). I find reading much easier when I know how to pronounce the characters.
Only today it dawned on me that you can switch the font in Chrome as well. Should have thought about it years ago
Here’s how it’s done. (very easy)
Just install the add-on “force font”.
Then, click on the “A” in your list of add ons.
Check the “Enabled?” box and you can choose a font.
For Chinese characters with Po Bo Mo Fo attached (not always, but most of the time, accurate) I use the font “Han Wang Kai Medium Chu In”.
Just click on “Add” and past these Chinese characters: 王漢宗中楷體注音*
Pasting the English font name does not seem to work.
I think you need to install the font also on your computer to make it work.
And voila, all Chinese characters now appear with Zhuyin Fuhao. The English letters are ugly, but who cares. You can disable the function any time you want to read English.
When it isn’t accurate, it is due to heterophone in Hanji. As a simple font, “Han Wang Kai Medium Chu In” isn’t trained to handle this. There are separate font files called
Han Wang Kai Medium Po In 1 王漢宗中楷體破音一
Han Wang Kai Medium Po In 2 王漢宗中楷體破音二
Han Wang Kai Medium Po In 3 王漢宗中楷體破音三
just to fill the gap. Still, that of course is nowhere near complete.
To do this accurately, someone need to use a neural network to parse and understand the context of the texts, and correctly output the right reading for the word, then use HTML’s Rubi markup to insert Rubi characters next to the characters.
On Mac, add-ons are called “extensions”. Found and added “force font”. No option to select font. I notice the extension hasn’t been updated since 2014.
I haven’t tried Perapera, but I’m using Zhongwen, which is also a chrome extension.
The translation, pinyin and tones show up in a pop-up when your mouse hovers a Chinese word. It also works in text box, in case your want to double check what you are writing.
Just downloaded the extension but it’s not working as I don’t have the 王漢宗中楷體注音 font installed in my System? How do I go about downloading that font? I went to Settings—>Personalization—>Fonts and found this particular Font missing…Searching in the Microsoft Store didn’t yield any results either.
