Name

       gpinyin - use Hanyu Pinyin Chinese in groff documents

Synopsis

       gpinyin [file ...]

       gpinyin -h
       gpinyin --help

       gpinyin -v
       gpinyin --version

Description

       gpinyin is a preprocessor for groff(1) that facilitates use of Hanyu Pinyin in groff(7) files.  Pinyin is
       a  method  for  writing the Mandarin Chinese language with the Latin alphabet.  Mandarin consists of more
       than four hundred base syllables, each spoken with one  of  five  different  tones.   Changing  the  tone
       applied  to  the  syllable  generally  alters the meaning of the word it forms.  In Pinyin, a syllable is
       written in the Latin alphabet and a numeric tone indicator can be appended to each syllable.

       Each input-file is a file name or the character “-” to indicate that the standard input stream should  be
       read.   As  usual,  the  argument  “--”  can  be  used  in order to force interpretation of all remaining
       arguments as file names, even if an input-file argument begins with a “-”.  -h and --help display a usage
       message, while -v and --version show version information; all exit afterward.

   Pinyin sections
       Pinyin sections in groff files are enclosed by  two  .pinyin  requests  with  different  arguments.   The
       starting request is
              .pinyin start
       or
              .pinyin begin
       and the ending request is
              .pinyin stop
       or
              .pinyin end
       .

   Syllables
       In  Pinyin,  each  syllable  is  represented  by  one  to six letters drawn from the fifty-two upper- and
       lowercase letters of the Unicode basic Latin character set, plus the letter “U” with dieresis (umlaut) in
       both cases—in other words, the members of the set “[a–zA–ZüÜ]”.

       In groff input, all basic Latin letters are written as themselves.  The “u with dieresis” can be  written
       as “\[:u]” in lowercase or “\[:U]” in uppercase.  Within .pinyin sections, gpinyin supports the form “ue”
       for lowercase and the forms “Ue” and “UE” for uppercase.

   Tones
       Each  syllable  has exactly one of five tones.  The fifth tone is not explicitly written at all, but each
       of the first through fourth tones is indicated with  a  diacritic  above  a  specific  vowel  within  the
       syllable.

       In  a  gpinyin  source  file,  these  tones are written by adding a numeral in the range 0 to 5 after the
       syllable.  The tone numbers 1 to 4 are transformed into accents above vowels in  the  output.   The  tone
       numbers 0 and 5 are synonymous.

       The tones are written as follows.

       Tone     Description      Diacritic   Example Input   Example Output
       ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
       first    flat             ¯           ma1             mā
       second   rising           ´           ma2             má
       third    falling-rising   ˇ           ma3             mǎ
       fourth   falling          `           ma4             mà
       fifth    neutral          (none)      ma0             ma
                                             ma5

       The neutral tone number can be omitted from a word-final syllable, but not otherwise.

Authors

       gpinyin was written by Bernd Warken.

See also

       Useful documents on the World Wide Web related to Pinyin include
           Pinyin to Unicode,
           On-line Chinese Tools,
           Pinyin.info: a guide to the writing of Mandarin Chinese in romanization,
           “Where do the tone marks go?”,
           pinyin.txt from the CJK macro package for TeX,
       and
           pinyin.sty from the CJK macro package for TeX.

       groff(1) and grog(1) explain how to view roff documents.

       groff(7)  and  groff_char(7) are comprehensive references covering the language elements of GNU troff and
       the available glyph repertoire, respectively.

groff 1.23.0                                       3 June 2025                                        gpinyin(1)