Formatting Chinese for study is not a font question. What makes a passage studiable is that the reading stays under the character it belongs to, so that tone, where one word ends and the next begins, and what the whole thing means are all visible at the same time. Lose the alignment and you are left with a block of characters and a separate block of syllables, which is two things to read rather than one thing to learn from.
This page covers what a usable layout has to do, the routes that usually fail — pasting into a word processor, converters that work one character at a time, screenshots — how to choose between Mandarin and Cantonese romanization, and how to get the whole sheet in one step.
What a study layout actually needs
A study sheet has one job a plain passage cannot do: show you which sound belongs to which character without your having to work it out. Everything below follows from that, and it is a short enough list that you can judge any tool against it in a minute.
The order matters as much as the contents. Characters first, reading under them, translation last is the arrangement you can study from, because you can cover the bottom line and test yourself. Put the translation on top and the sheet answers the question before you have read the sentence.
- Romanization aligned under the character it belongs to — not gathered into a second column, and not a paragraph of syllables underneath the passage. A separate column means counting positions to find out which reading goes with which character, and nobody keeps doing that past the second line.
- Tone marked, and marked the same way throughout. Tone is not decoration: in Mandarin it is the difference between mā, má, mǎ and mà, and in Cantonese the six tones are what separate si1, si2, si3, si4, si5 and si6. A sheet with the tones stripped out teaches the wrong pronunciation quietly.
- Word boundaries you can see. Readings grouped by word tell you that 廣東話 is one word rather than three characters that happened to land next to each other, which is most of what beginners are actually missing.
- A translation, kept with the text rather than on another page. Looking a sentence up somewhere else breaks the reading pass you were in the middle of.
- A format that survives: something you can print, or keep editing, or paste into the notes app you already use. A sheet you cannot get into your own materials gets made once and never opened again.
What usually goes wrong: Word, converters, screenshots
Three approaches come up again and again, and each fails in a way that is not obvious until you have already put the work in.
- Pasting into a word processor. Characters and readings end up in the same file, but the alignment is being held up by spaces, and a Chinese character is not the width of a Latin letter. Change the font, change the margins, or add a word at the start of the line, and the readings slide out from under their characters. Word does have a phonetic guide feature intended for this, but it annotates a selection at a time, which is fine for a sentence and a long afternoon for a page.
- Converters that work one character at a time. They produce a reading for every character, and some of those readings are the wrong one, because a character's reading depends on the word it sits in. 行 is xíng on its own and háng in 銀行; 重 is zhòng in 重要 and chóng in 重複. In Cantonese the same problem gives you 生 as sang1 when 學生 wants saang1. You cannot spot these without already knowing the answer, which is the reason you were using the converter.
- Screenshots of a dictionary or a reader app. The readings are usually right, and the result is an image: not searchable, not editable, not printable at a size you can annotate, and impossible to find again three weeks later when you want the sentence and not the picture of it.
The quick test for any converter: give it 學生, 銀行 and 重要 and see whether the readings change from the ones the single characters get. If they do not, it is a lookup table, and you will be correcting it by hand.
Mandarin or Cantonese: which romanization goes on the sheet
Chinese characters do not carry one pronunciation, so the first decision is which language the sheet is for. Mandarin materials use pinyin, which marks tone with a diacritic over the vowel. Cantonese materials use Jyutping, which marks tone with a digit 1-6 after the syllable, or Yale, which uses diacritics and an inserted h. 香港 is Xiānggǎng in Mandarin pinyin and hoeng1 gong2 in Jyutping — same characters, different language, different sheet.
Pick the scheme your own materials use rather than the one you find nicest. The point of romanization on a study sheet is that it matches the textbook, the class handout and the dictionary you look things up in; a sheet in a second scheme adds a translation step every time you read it. If nothing is deciding for you and you are studying Cantonese, Jyutping is the practical default, because it is plain ASCII and it is what Hong Kong input methods and modern dictionaries expect.
One text can be laid out either way, which is occasionally the point: the same passage with pinyin and again with Jyutping is a direct way to see how far the two pronunciations of the same characters have drifted.
Do it in one step
Paste the text, choose the romanization and the language you want the translation in, and export. The sheet comes out with the reading aligned under each character and the translation underneath, so there is no pass where you line anything up by hand.
- Paste the Chinese text, or upload a file — .txt, .md, .docx and .pdf are read directly, and a photo of a page works as an image.
- Choose the romanization: pinyin for Mandarin, or Jyutping, Yale, or Yale with tone numbers for Cantonese.
- Choose the target language for the translation, or leave it alone — Chinese input is translated to English unless you say otherwise.
- Export: PDF to print, DOCX if you want to keep editing it, Markdown to paste into your notes.
- Readings are looked up for the whole line rather than character by character, so ordinary vocabulary comes out with its in-word reading instead of its citation reading.
- Traditional and Simplified input both work, and setting a Chinese target language converts the characters as well as translating.
- A photo or a scan is transcribed before it is romanized, so check the transcription — reading Chinese off a photograph is the step most likely to introduce an error. A PDF that is really a scan has no text to extract; upload it as an image instead.
- Exports carry a small footer credit, and a checkbox under Advanced options turns it off.
Common questions
- Is this the same as "Chinese formatting" in Word or InDesign?
- No. That is typography — East Asian fonts, line-breaking rules, punctuation widths, vertical text. This is study layout: the reading under each character and the meaning with it. If you are typesetting a book, you want the typography settings; if you are trying to read a passage, you want this.
- Pinyin or Jyutping?
- Whichever matches the language you are studying. Pinyin is for Mandarin, Jyutping and Yale are for Cantonese. If your textbook and your class use one, use that one — the sheet is meant to sit alongside them, not to introduce a second system you also have to learn.
- Can I use it in Obsidian or Telegram?
- Yes. The same engine is behind an Obsidian plugin, which formats a selection inside your notes, and a Telegram bot, which takes text or a photo in a chat. Both are listed on the /software page.