I need chinese characters.

October 14, 2005 2:46 AM

How do I convert Pinyin text to chinese characters? Using a web technology?

I'm currently learning chinese, and I want to make a simple flashcards website to allow me practise my recognition of chinese characters. It will also be a good way to get my feet wet with this Ajax thing everyone is talking about.

But I need a way of adding and displaying the chinese characters into the website. The optimal solution would be if I had a server side unicode chinese character to image converter, and access to a dictionary where I could simply copy over everything into a database.

Then I could client side request the words based on the corresponding english words. But where do I get the client side chinese character to image convert?

posted by markesh to Writing & Language (5 answers total)

You're might have trouble doing it that way round, since Pinyin transliterations often correspond to many different characters. Does Zhongwen.com offer anything close to what you're after? It links to a Java-driven character recognition applet that seems close to what you're after: you won't get the Ajax lesson, but I suspect that this isn't the ideal learning project...
posted by holgate at 3:34 AM on October 14, 2005

Response by poster: Hi holgate, from an event driven point of view, flashcards should be quite easy to implement. It would run this way

1. Display page. User clicks button
2. Request image and pinyin text from webserver
3. Display same and wait for user to click button again

The problems lie elsewhere - getting the chinese characters and converting them to images for display. And that has not very much to do with ajax.

Thanks for the link, I could use it to practise, but I'd like to make something very simple and straightforward.
posted by markesh at 6:12 AM on October 14, 2005

Try the already created flash cards at Yellow Bridge.

It doesn't meet your 'I want to make' requirement but maybe finding it already done will sate that thirst and leave you more time to study.
posted by geekyguy at 6:18 AM on October 14, 2005

Why would you need to convert the characters to an image? If you handle it all in Unicode, couldn't you just print Unicode text (assuming the proper fonts are installed on the client)?

If you're a beginner and your vocabulary is fairly limited, you'd be better off entering the characters into the databse yourself. Just make sure you include a way to input your tones.
posted by alidarbac at 7:21 AM on October 14, 2005

My wife uses the programs from this company.
posted by Pollomacho at 8:05 AM on October 14, 2005