The Chinese Pinyin Annotator places the romanised reading of each Simplified Chinese character directly above it, using the same ruby layout found in learner textbooks and graded readers. Paste a sentence and instantly see how it should be pronounced, tone marks and all — a fast way to bridge the gap between recognising characters and saying them aloud.
How it works
Each character in your text is looked up in a built-in dictionary that maps it to its Hanyu Pinyin reading, complete with the diacritic that encodes the tone. The annotator wraps every matched character in an HTML <ruby> element with the pinyin inside an <rt> (ruby text) tag, which the browser positions above the base character. Characters that are not in the dictionary — and any non-Chinese text such as punctuation — pass through unchanged so the original layout is preserved.
The four Mandarin tones are written as ā á ǎ à over the main vowel of each syllable, following the standard tone-placement rules. A syllable with no diacritic is read in the neutral (light) tone.
Tips and notes
Pinyin annotation is most useful for short passages, vocabulary lists and subtitle lines where you want a pronunciation prompt without switching to a dictionary. Because some characters are heteronyms — 长 can be cháng (long) or zhǎng (to grow) — the tool always shows the most frequent reading; double-check context-sensitive words. The dictionary covers the highest-frequency characters that make up the bulk of everyday text, and the coverage counter under the output tells you how many characters were matched so you know when a manual reading is still needed. Everything runs locally in your browser, so private text never leaves your device.