Feature Suggestion allow Japanese users to add tone/pitch marks

General
1

I had this idea when commenting on the 「I don’t understand Skritter (Japanese, moved from uncategorized)」 thread. Could you let Japanese users add tone/pitch marks to words and sentences? Especially sentences as I feel having tone marks there would add a lot of value to accent reduction. It would go great with sentence audio if that gets added in the future too.

2

We wouldn’t be able to get to it soon, but I think this is something we might be able to (and should!) tackle when the time comes. Great suggestion!

In the meantime, you could add the pitch accent to the mnemonics area, or to a personal definition edit.

3

While adding the pitch in the mnemonics area sounds like a good temporary solution I do have one problem with that. The problem is I have no idea how to add pitch marks for Japanese there.

In “Japanese the Spoken Language” (JSL) the pitch marks I see over the letter don’t seem to be supported by any font I am aware of. So that leaves me with three options (maybe 4) non of which I think will work in the mnemonic area at present.

  1. Create and use a custom font
  2. Use furigana
  3. Use a combination of XML and SVG

Number 1 will look clunky. If at a latter date you decide you want to use a different looking font you need to create a new custom font again. Copying and pasting to a different program will give you gibberish as it does in JSL. Would require making the font, add the font to Skritter, and make an interface for using the custom font with Skritter.

Number 2 will look clunky. You can change the fonts and copying and pasting should work. Would require adding an interface for using the furigana with Skritter.

Number 3 should look nice. You can change the fonts but copying and pasting won’t transfer the pitch data (or if it did other programs wouldn’t know how to render it). Would require creating a custom XML to SVG parser rendering engine and making an interface for editing it with Skritter.

The 4th option is to do number 2 in the editing area (like how the * _ are used now) and then pass that info to a special rendering engine like in number 3. The 4th option would give the best results but be the most work. However I think number 2 will give the next best results with the least work. My suggestion would be to do number 2 first then maybe latter you could do number 4.

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