Chinese words separator: Chinese dictionary

Thanks for the feedback CWS has a Read Offline functionality wherein you can paste(or type) your own text. If you want a natural sounding voice and continuous text-to-speech functionality like Natural Reader, use CWS on Microsoft Edge. After you paste(or type) the text you want to listen to, right-click the text where you want Edge to start speaking the text for you, and then choose `Read aloud from here` Caveat, Edge overrides CWS's separating colors of the active line of text the Edge is speaking, the color of the text will just be highlighted with light blue background and black text, you won't be able to see the separating color, e.g., tone color. If you still want to see the tone of the text being actively spoken by Edge, you can either set the Guide to Pīnyīn, or set the Guide to Tone You can choose the type of voice you want to hear on Edge's Read Aloud when using CWS's Read Offline. For male voice, Microsoft Yunjian sounds good; for female voice, Microsoft Xiaoxiao sounds good. Microsoft Xiaoxiao is the text-to-speech voice used by Bing Translate website If you still prefer to use Google Chrome for TTS, you can also make CWS read long text continuously. You just have to highlight the text first, then click the CWS tooltip icon to show the dictionary, then press 's' (default keyboard shortcut) to make CWS speak the highlighted text If you want to use Microsoft Xiaoxiao voice while still using Google Chrome, after highlighting the text you want to listen to in CWS's Read Offline, click CWS tooltip icon, then click the Bing Translate icon (after Google and DeepL icons). And then when the Bing Translate pops up, check the `Automatic read aloud. Manually click the speaker icon once, then it should be automatic afterwards` checkbox

UPDATE: Dec 5, 2024: Changed the 🧭 emoji to ⬇️ emoji. Added an option that makes the dictionary appear above the current text instead of below (default). To use this, on CWS toolbar pop-up settings, change ⬇️ to ⬆️. This will take effect when the latest (8.24.84.2620, currently in Pending Review) CWS is published in Chrome web store ---------- > Once the dictionary shows, it usually blocks the next line of text and i have to move it with another voice command to continue reading. You can make the dictionary appear at the right side by changing the location to ➡️, this setting can be changed in CWS toolbar pop-up screen, look for the location dropdown with the default value of 🧭. If you are using the word dictionary and not the sentence dictionary, you can also place it on following locations so that the pop-up will not block the text that is being read: ↖️, ↗️, ↘️, ↙️ I'm about to reply to your inquiry as soon as I saw your review appeared on my Chrome web store Dashboard notification last November 14. For some reasons though, it's only today (November 24) that Google shows your review in Chrome web store. There's another review today, it does not appear on Chrome web store also, I guess it will be shown on December 4

UPDATE(December 29, 2024): You can read ebooks here: https://lwebapp.com/en/epub-reader https://lwebapp.com/en/mobi-reader https://lwebapp.com/en/docx-reader The mobi-reader is not working well, it's only able to display the first page only. Not yet tried docx TIL: epub file is just a zip of HTML + CSS files. You can rename .epub to .zip, and then extract its html + css contents to a directory. To make CWS able to work on local html files, right-click CWS icon in Chrome's toolbar, then select Manage Extension, and then enable *Allow access to file URLs*. After that, you can open the extracted html files in the directory by double-clicking an html file, CWS will be able to display the dictionary and even the page-annotating functionalities like words separator and pinyin annotation will work I tried renaming .epub to .zip in macOS Finder, but when double-clicking the .zip file, Finder can't extract the zip contents, it says *Unable to expand "sample-ebook.zip". It is in an unsupported format* . So you have to use Terminal instead, and then use the command-line unzipper: unzip sample-ebook.zip -d sample-ebook Windows have better file manager than macOS, I think extracting .zip from Windows' File Explorer will work out of the box ----- Chinese words separator works on HTML only. If you open/drag a PDF file directly to Chrome, its built-in PDF viewer is the one that will render the PDF. CWS, or any browser extensions for that matter, works on HTML only. Fortunately, there is a PDF viewer library that renders PDF as HTML, the library is PDF.js, which is made by Mozilla Mozilla have a demo of PDF.js in this link: https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/web/viewer.html?file= You can open or drag any PDF file to that link After opening/dragging a PDF file to that link, you can use almost all of CWS dictionary functionalities on the HTML page rendered by PDF.js. However, page-modifying functionalities of CWS like pinyin annotator and colorizer won't work on the HTML page rendered by PDF.js. The text content of HTML rendered by PDF.js have fixed locations in a page, or maybe that's the nature of a PDF format. As such, annotating text with pinyin is not feasible, as CWS pinyin annotator won't be able to shift down the text contents of the PDF, the annotations will just be overlaid directly on the top of the Chinese characters, which is just a mess If you need pinyin annotations and colors on a Chinese text, copy the PDF's text and paste it in CWS's Read offline tool

What's with that review? You did not even qualify which part is useless, is it the words separator? is it the dictionary? The initials of your real name is ACY, then you quickly change your name to just A A in just a minute. You don't want your non-objective review to be attached to your real name. Qualify your review, we can improve things much that way, we will know which part need to be corrected or fixed, or there might be a functionality that you need and you want it be added to CWS

UPDATE: > the Ctrl key will activate the pop-up dictionary and afterwards the textbox for entering Chinese text is no longer editable Internally, CWS's dictionary works on text that are from the page only. If the text is inside the textbox, CWS's dictionary will not work. So to make CWS dictionary able to work even on text inside the textbox, it overlays an invisible page directly on top of the text, the side effect though as you observed is that if you typed a text immediately after the dictionary pops-up, your typed text won't replace the existing highlighted text, as the text that has the focus is the invisible page's text, not the textbox's text. So to edit the text inside the textbox after the dictionary pops-up, you have to make the dictionary disappear first, this can be done by clicking the mouse anywhere on the text first, then you can resume typing/editing over the existing text Anyway, you must do the above when you need to resume typing after the dictionary appears. As when the dictionary pops up, the CWS's dictionary various functionalities' can be activated by keyboard shortcuts. So for example if you type the word 热 (pinyin 're'), the Remember functionality (adding of word to Google Sheet's Learning Tracking Sheet) will be invoked as you trigger the Remember functionality by pressing the Remember functionality's keyboard shortuct 'r'. To prevent accidentally invoking the dictionary functionalities when typing, you have to make the dictionary disappear first by clicking anywhere in the text, then resume typing UPDATE: October 2 *Hoverless video dictionary* is now renamed as *Video settings etc* ------- > Youtube also will stop playing the video when the popup appears The video Auto-pause setting can be set in Hoverless video dictionary > I noticed that it does not work well on google translate site If you need to see the definition of Chinese text in the text box, before you hover the mouse cursor on the Chinese text in the text box, press Ctrl. Or are there any other functionalities of CWS that does not work well on Google Translate? > Some easy way of disabling and enabling it Added the disable shortcut icon 🚫 in the pop-up. This will be available on version 8.24.84.2440, currently in Pending Review, will be available as soon as Google approved it

You're welcome. CWS won't get removed, it follows best practices

Chinese words separator works on HTML only. If you open/drag a PDF file directly to Chrome, its built-in PDF viewer is the one that will render the PDF. CWS, or any browser extensions for that matter, works on HTML only. Fortunately, there is a PDF viewer library that renders PDF as HTML, the library is PDF.js, which is made by Mozilla Mozilla have a demo of PDF.js in this link: https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/web/viewer.html?file= You can open or drag any PDF file to that link After opening/dragging a PDF file to that link, you can use almost all of CWS dictionary functionalities on the HTML page rendered by PDF.js. However, page-modifying functionalities of CWS like pinyin annotator and colorizer won't work on the HTML page rendered by PDF.js. The text content of HTML rendered by PDF.js have fixed locations in a page, or maybe that's the nature of a PDF format. As such, annotating text with pinyin is not feasible, as CWS pinyin annotator won't be able to shift down the text contents of the PDF, the annotations will just be overlaid directly on the top of the Chinese characters, which is just a mess If you need pinyin annotations and colors on a Chinese text, copy the PDF's text and paste it in CWS's Read offline tool