Add ability to input pinyin tones

[MattHoward-GH]

First of all I want to say thank you for creating this app, it's nice to have a privacy respecting keyboard for typing Chinese!

As I Chinese learner I use this keyboard from time to time to write notes. I'm hoping that using this keyboard will help me to memorise characters and thus help me improve both my reading and writing.

Whilst writing my notes I've always wanted to write the pinyin for character underneath to help me to remember the pronounciation and along with this the tone, for example:

练习
liànxí
practice/study

However as far as I'm aware there is currently no way to input these characters (í), so I fall back to using numbers:

lian4xi2

I think you've added some more academic tonal indicators such as ˥˦˧˨˩ and ꜀꜁꜂꜃꜄꜅꜆꜇ but I don't think these fulfil the same usecase.

[yawnoc]

Thank you for the feature request.

As I understand, the typical mechanism among IMEs nowadays is for long-press of each base letter to result in a pop-up containing the diacritical variants. This approach requires significantly reworking the touch logic, so I hesitate.

More practical is to add a second Symbols page to English mode. To preserve the existing single-tap toggle between Letters (ABC) and Symbols (!@#) on the bottom-left, I would take out two of the existing currency symbols (probably Euro and Pound) to make room for an English Symbols pager (1/2, 2/2). A (new) second Symbols page would then contain the relevant diacritical letters, plus the two displaced currency symbols.

In terms of your use-case, you would type ASCII letters in English mode until you want a diacritical letter, at which point you would:

1. Tap !@# to switch to Symbols
2. Tap 1/2 to switch to the second Symbols page
3. Tap the required diacritical letter
4. Tap ABC to switch back to Letters.

This amounts to three additional taps per diacritical letter, which is not ideal, but is the best I can do given the constraints.

[yawnoc]

For the second Symbols page, I'm thinking the following layout, but let me know if something else makes more sense:

ā á ǎ à ō ó ǒ ò   ʻ
ē é ě è ū ú ǔ ù   ê
ī í ǐ ì ǖ ǘ ǚ ǜ ü ŭ
2/2 € £         BSP
!@# ,  SPACE  . RET

The three characters along the right (ʻ, ê, ŭ) are used in Wade–Giles. Even with those, we still have room for six more symbols in the future.

If there is a need for uppercase, I can add a third Symbols page. (The logical position for the Shift key is already occupied by the Pager.)

[MattHoward-GH]

Thanks for the quick reponse!

Yeah I can understand the long-press functionality would be difficult to implement. I think the solution you've come up with is perfectly fine and I would be more than happy with it!

An alternative idea I've thought of is being able to swipe on the space bar to a 'Pinyin' keyboard, however this could be an annoyance for existing users trying to swipe between the 'Chinese' and 'English' keyboards depending on how the swiping is implemented.

Swiping right (-->) on the spacebar:
Chinese --> English --> Pinyin

Then swiping left (<--) on the spacebar:
Pinyin <-- English <-- Chinese

I guess the annoyance here would be if they expected the swipe right on English to circle back around to Chinese, however in this case they could have just swiped left, but it would take some getting used to.

I also understand if you would rather not have a third keyboard just from a minimalistic sort of perspective!

Also thinking about it I'm not sure this would be any easier than the flow you have already mentioned.

Taking 'liàn' as an example and starting from the English keyboard.

Your proposed flow:

• Press 'l'
• Press 'i'
• Press '!@#'
• Press '1/2'
• Press 'à'
• Press 'ABC' (No need to press 1/2 before doing this)
• Press 'n'

For the alternative flow:

• Press 'l'
• Press 'i'
• Swipe right on spacebar
• Press 'à'
• Swipe left on spacebar
• Press 'n'

So it would only save a single character press.

Plus I'm not sure if you were thinking this but in the flow you have suggested if the state of the '1/2' button is stored, then if you go to type a second character then you would only need to press '!@#' since you'd already be on the second page, in which case both flows would require the same number of keypresses.