Creating text files for the Reader

Hi All,

I'm trying to find information on how to create text files for the reader. The manual is clear on what I should do once I have them, but I haven't found a good resource along the lines of "creating chinese-language text files for dummies".

Here's what I've found so far:

I've had no luck copying characters into Word, then saving as text. Apparently this doesn't save in any of the formats that the reader desires.

I can paste content into Clavis Sinica and save as Unicode, then open the files in the reader as UTF-16(BE). This seems to work fine, except...

If I try to paste characters from my ChinesePod lesson PDFs into Clavis, this doesn't work. As ChinesePod and Pleco are my two favorite ways to study Chinese, this is a problem.

So, two questions:

1. Can you suggest any free or inexpensive options for saving Chinese characters into an acceptably formatted text file, other than Clavis? I'm open to paying $50 for Clavis, but are there other options?

2. Is there *any* way to get ChinesePod content into the reader without retyping? The problem doesn't seem to be with the fact that the lessons are in PDF format - I can copy and paste characters from the MIT Open Courseware PDF resources into Clavis Sinica without problems.

Thanks,

Douglas
 
Perhaps by "Microsoft Editor" the previous post meant "Notepad". In any case, you CAN use notepad for this. That's what I often do (if I'm not using Wenlin).

At the bottom of the SAVE dialog, you need to change the file type from ASCII to Unicode. You can choose any of them, actually, since they all work, but the UTF-8 one is the least confusing name. For example, on my system, Wenlin normally saves in 16 bit Unicode (Unicode Big Endian in the notepad save as dialog).

Note that if you ALREADY have a text file, then you have to choose "Save As" to get the dialog to open where you can chose a format.

I haven't checked any recent ChinesePod PDF files, but for most PDF files, you can simply copy the text from the PDF and then paste into the target application. Again, if you use Notepad as your target, Windows will automatically detect the encoding and display it correctly. Then all you need to do is save it in Unicode format.

I've added this explanation and some screen pictures to the "Reader Files" section of the wiki at http://www.china.panlogicsoftware.com/v ... text_files

I'd appreciate anyone adding a "how to on the Mac" for this.

Stephan
 

ipsi

状元
I understand that the ChinesePod PDF files don't necessarily use a standard encoding, and so copy-paste may not end up working, and your only choice will be to re-type it. It's a pain in the ass, but there's nothing you can do about that. There was a thread on Chinese-Forums.com about that not long ago.

For reference, You should choose one of Unicode, Unicode Big Endian or UTF-8 when using Notepad in Windows to save your text files.

When opening them in Pleco, they correspond to:

Unicode = UTF-16 (LE)
Unicode Big Endian = UTF-16 (BE)
UTF-8 = UTF-8

I believe.
 
Hi All,

I've solved the ChinesePod -> Pleco reader problem. The chinese-forums.com post that ipsi mentioned gave me a clue and with a little more investigation I found a solution...

You can't use the CP PDFs, but if you have a premium-level subscription you can:
- Go into a lesson
- Click on the Dialogue tab
- Copy characters from web page into NotePad

Life is good! :)

Douglas
 

ldolse

状元
Chinesepod also has a plain-text version of their dialogs. For reasons I cannot comprehend they only put the link to the plain text dialog in the pdf itself. It's actually html and not plain text, but still more useful. Anyway you can cut and paste from here to the reader as well. If you generate a list of pdfs to download from their feeds you can just do a find and replace to create the txt urls.
 
Top