Pinyin Typist is *noticeably* the quickest, easiest, most natural, most fun, and most beautifully iOS-native way to type exactly the Pinyin you want, with proper tone marks, on the iPad, the iPhone, and the iPod touch. Its *nice, big* tone mark, Ü, hyphen, and apostrophe buttons work with *just a simple tap*, and *it even puts the tone marks over the right vowels for you*.

With Pinyin Typist, you can quickly and easily type real Pinyin text with tone marks to write down anything you hear or want to say in Mandarin, just about anytime the need arises or inspiration strikes. Pinyin Typist is thus a must-have app if you are learning or teaching Mandarin, or if sometimes you want or need to write down Mandarin expressions, but you or the one(s) you’re writing to don’t (or don’t want to have to) know all the Chinese characters involved. (THIS APP IS NOT AN ALTERNATIVE WAY TO TYPE CHINESE CHARACTERS—it supports the standard iOS ways of entering characters.)

Note that like Chinese Braille (which is based on Pinyin), Pinyin is a full *writing system* for Mandarin, not just a pronunciation aid. And since, as linguists hold, speech is primary and writing is secondary, it’s good that Pinyin just works and lets you focus on speech, on *communicating*.

All the text in the Pinyin Typing tab view can be copied at the touch of a button, and then pasted in other apps. (Also, iOS’s standard copying and pasting methods are supported.)

At the touch of another button, all the text in the Pinyin Typing tab view can be inserted directly into an HTML email.

When running on iOS 5 or above, a button is available for tweeting the text in the Pinyin Typing tab view.

Many people find Pinyin to be a very powerful supercharger of their efforts to learn and use Mandarin. However, because of its dastardly, diabolical diacritical tone marks, many have also found Pinyin to be a real pain to type into their computing devices. Pinyin Typist turns typing Pinyin from a pain into a pleasure.

Note: Pinyin Typist’s 1,2, and 4 tone buttons can also be used to add diacritical tone marks for Cantonese Yale romanization.



*TYPING PINYIN IN PINYIN TYPIST*


To type a third tone “a” (“ǎ”),

• just type an “a”,

• then tap the 3 button above the regular keyboard to add the third tone mark.


To type a fourth tone “ai” Pinyin final (“ài”),

• you can type “ai”,

• then tap the 4 button above the regular keyboard.

◦ Pinyin Typist will then automatically properly add the fourth tone mark above the “a” instead of the “i”.


Pinyin Typist can convert both lowercase and uppercase vowels, and all the Pinyin Typist toolbar buttons enter typographically correct Unicode characters.

Pinyin Typist works well with hardware keyboards.



*OTHER FEATURES*

• Pinyin Typist can be used in both portrait and landscape orientations.

• The size of the text in the Pinyin Typing tab view can be quickly and easily adjusted with a slider. This can make those little Pinyin tone marks easier to see.

• iOS’s international keyboards still work as usual, including the Simplified and Traditional Chinese ones.

• The text in the Pinyin Typing tab view can be saved as a snippet for future use, with a title that you can choose. When a snippet is reloaded into the Pinyin Typing tab view, its text size is restored along with its text. The text of a snippet can be copied to the clipboard, and its title and its text can be shared via HTML email. Also, when running on iOS 5 or above, the text of a snippet can be tweeted.

• An optional Night Theme is available.

• Different fonts can be selected for the text in the Pinyin Typing tab view.



*PINYIN TEXT WITH FORMATTING*

Pinyin Typist produces Unicode plain text, which can be used to produce Markdown, HTML, CSS, etc. code. When such code is rendered in supporting environments, e.g. Pinyin Typist’s HTML emails, apps with Markdown/web preview, etc., formatting can be seen that’s like the formatting seen in web pages.