Hi there,
Wikipedia has a lot of Chinese history articles that would benefit
from a fast way to mark up 'pinyin'. Pinyin is basically a romanization
system for standard Chinese, in which syllables are represented as
words built through the combination of a sound in letters, such as
'zhao' and a number for tone, such as 1. Thus, zhao1 would be
first-tone.
The 'mark up' that I referred to was converting from this, uglier
system of pinyin to the more attractive unicode system, whereby
vowels are marked with various shaped lines in order to visually
communicate the tonal direction.
(Better explanation at
http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin )
There's a PHP function already written to do this, which I
suppose could be modified and included as a new function in
wiki markup. You can find it here:
http://www.foolsworkshop.com/downloads/pinyintounicode.txt
And an online demo (try some input like ni3 hao3 - 'hello' in
Chinese), here:
http://www.foolsworkshop.com/ptou/
Regards,
Walter Stanish
PS: I'm going straight off the list (I'm online via GPRS and can't
afford to download heaps of messages - or the wikipedia codebase
to make the change myself), so please CC me diretly on any
response.