Posting pinyin - to tone-mark or not to tone-mark?

Language Learning Chinese
1

Which is better for use on this site?

  • Tone-marked
  • Numbered
  • What? I just woke and Wade-Giles is gone???

0 voters

I was under the impression that pretty much everyone had a computer which can handle tone-marked pinyin, but Dragonbones has been stalking me around the forums :wink:, changing my lovely tone-marked pinyin for numbered pinyin. <it’s so ugly! someone cries from the back of the room>

Which do people prefer? Does adding tone marks screw your display up?

Example:

Smooth, cool-looking tone-marked pinyin: jiăqu

2

:laughing: I voted for tone-marked, but the problem is that the third tones for some vowels don’t display on some browsers. The result isn’t just the loss of the diacritical, it’s the loss of the vowel too, which turns into an even uglier white box. If this technical problem can be overcome, the marks are much more attractive, I agree!

3

Numbered is easier to type, far and away, but considering I’m tone deaf I don’t really care either way, ‘cause I dont’ know the damn tones to start with :laughing:

4

I don’t see any signifigant gain with tone marked vs numbered pinyin. I think either will do. Posting using tone marked pinyin takes more effort, so I tend to just use numbered. Although, when I did the Chinese sentence of the day for a week, I used tone marks.

5

I much prefer tone marks to numbers. But getting the marks to display properly can be a little tricy. See How to put Pinyin with tone marks on Web pages, especially the section on CSS.

Any chance of getting a special Pinyin tag (a SPAN with a class of “py”, or something like that) here on Forumosa that would allow for this to work better?