Help

The usage of this app is supposed to be quite simple: it's a web browser. You can browse your favourite Chinese website in the normal way and the app should add Pinyin pronunciation aids to any Chinese text you encounter.

Definitions and 3-line

If you tap—and by “tap” we mean “put a finger down and remove it quickly” (do not leave your finger on the screen for any length of time, or Android will count it as a “long press” which is something entirely different and is covered below)—if you short tap on any Chinese word, you should see:

a very brief English definition,
buttons to open Pleco or Hanping if you have one of these third-party apps installed—that will get you a better definition and a chance to hear the word spoken as audio (but you must install Pleco or Hanping separately first before this button appears—and if it doesn't work, try restarting this app, see below),
a button to choose between 1-line, 2-line or 3-line mode if you want it. This is not recommended: you learn faster if you make yourself use 2-line and look up the words individually.
- If you additionally want to try learning to read some characters, you can change the drop-down on the start screen from "Annotate all" to "Leave 10 known", "Leave 20 known" etc (referring to the most commonly-used 10, 20 etc characters). You can then additionally use the popup's 1L/2L/3L button to hide or reveal the annotation for the characters you've chosen as "known".

Bookmarks and PDF

At the bottom of the screen, there are small buttons to:

bookmark the current page (the bookmark symbol),
copy the current URL (the clipboard symbol, useful if you need to share the page you are looking at with someone else via a messaging app, although if they open it with an ordinary Web browser they will not get any Pinyin added by Pinyin Web & EPUB, although they'll still get any official pinyin that was on the site itself),
print the current page to PDF (the printer symbol)—this requires Android 4.4 or above, so if you have an old Galaxy S2 or similar then this button will not appear,
and an X to make these buttons go away—this is for use if you don't want to use any of those functions and you need more screen space.

The 3-line mode and the "X" are effective for only the current page and will revert if you tap on a link to a new page.

You can use the phone's Back button to go back, in which case a Forward button should appear in the button-bar at the bottom if you want to undo the Back.

If you want to go all the way back to the start screen, you don't have to press Back many times—you can just quit the app and restart it. To quit the app, you usually have to go to Android's "recent apps" screen (depends on which version of Android, but try pressing the right-hand soft key), find Pinyin Web & EPUB, and swipe it off-screen. Then launch the app again and you should find it has gone back to the start screen. In some versions of Android, the "recent apps" screen also has a feature to let you run two apps side-by-side, both visible at the same time.

When you bookmark a page, the bookmark will appear on Pinyin Web & EPUB's start screen.

Highlighting and copying

If you want to highlight a word, first of all long-press to start selecting text, then drag the selection boundaries as appropriate, and then some coloured highlighter buttons should appear toward the top of the screen, as well as an option to let you copy the text to another app. This copies just the Chinese line, so you can paste it into a message or other tool; if you want to copy the other lines then you may copy one word at a time from the definition pop-up.

Make sure to start the long-press on a word (not in a space). This is an Android limitation.

Highlights are not saved, so if you want to save the highlights you have to use the "print to PDF" option; highlights will be included in the resulting PDF file.

Offline use

To use this app with EPUB files, you first have to download the EPUB file separately (for example, using your normal Chrome browser to open a website that makes Chinese publications available in EPUB format, making sure to choose EPUB not PDF, then Chrome will save the EPUB to the Downloads folder on your phone), and then either

open that folder using any file manager app, and try to open the EPUB file—at this point the device should give you a choice of what application to open this file with, and it should list Pinyin Web & EPUB as one of the options, or
inside this Pinyin Web & EPUB app, tap "Offline EPUB file" and navigate to the folder where you downloaded the EPUB (if you don't know, it's probably in Downloads)

You can use the app with EPUB files even when you are offline, as long as you have downloaded the EPUB files in advance.

The other thing you can do if you know you are going to go offline is to open the page for the article you want, and just leave it open. The app will try very hard not to 'forget' the page that's currently open. But offline use is better if you have an EPUB. (This is useful if you are going to be in somebody else's house and you have no idea if they are in a data-signal blackspot or not.)

Finally, if you are offline and you've forgotten to download the EPUB file, but you have an app on your phone that can present the Chinese text, then you can transfer the text into Pinyin Web & EPUB. Method 1: use copy and paste (select text in the other app, Copy, go into Pinyin Web & EPUB, and on the start screen choose "Clipboard" and then you should see your text with annotation added); Method 2: use Share Text (select text in the other app, press Share, choose Pinyin Web & EPUB, and you should see your text with annotation added). Obviously neither of these methods are quite as convenient because you have to select all the text first, but if you are absolutely stuck somewhere with no Internet connection and no EPUB files downloaded then at least you can do something.

The above method can also be used to help read any Chinese text messages etc you receive.

End of help text

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