converter (characters, proper pinyin) -> pinyin without tone marks

[Tommie]

Dear all,

my request might sound strange, however I would like to find a converter which transforms characters or proper pinyin to pinyin without tone marks.

First the "why?" question answered:

I do have several PDFs with titles in fantizi.

When I could not open these, I transformed them to jiantizi.

Still to no avail. Then I shortened the (quite) long titles -> nada.

I tried pinyin titles -> niente (my Windows system won't open them).

Only when I use plain Latin letters for the titles, I do have success.

Now, characters would give me the highest information density,

proper pinyin a bit more noise, pinyin numbers make the titles even longer, consequently I prefer 'pinyin without tonal information'.

A converter which can do that

pinyin -> pinyin without tones

would help me saving time for that goal.

Alternative, BETTER solution (?):

How do I prepare my stupid computer to open

PDFs with titles comprising fantizi or jiantizi

(which seems to be the intial stumbling block).

Many thanks in advance

for suggestions, tips & solutions,

Tommie

[roddy]

I'm a bit confused, what actual format is the information in now? Filenames attached to lots of files? How do you intend to batch process that?

[Tommie]

I'm a bit confused' date=' what actual format is the information in now? Filenames attached to lots of files?

[/quote']

Well, I'm more confused than you are , Roddy!

Normal image PDFs of 圍棋 books with titles as e.g.

[圍棋][電子書]劫爭致勝之道.pdf

A lot? Say a hundred.

How do you intend to batch process that?

I'm not a nerd, hence I didn't even think of batch-processing

(I thought I was asking here the questions )

Asking the right questions may be half the solution:

is this an ACROBAT problem?

Can ADOBE not deal with characters or pinyin??? (I don't think so)

Can one set languages in PDF docs or the ACROBAT reader as one has to do it in Windows?

is this a WINDOWS problem?

should I set or download something??

Many thanks in advance,

Tommie

[roddy]

I have no idea why you can't open them with the current file names, but surely copying and pasting, converting, copying and pasting back, every file name is going to be an almighty hassle. There are windows utilities to batch change file names, like this - that's not the exact one I used though, so can't be sure if it'll work. But what I would try to do is . . .

Find a batch file processor, perhaps that one, which will let me copy and paste out the filenames as one chunk of text

convert to simplified

convert to pinyin

paste into wordpad or similar

do find and replaces to get rid of the tone numbers - ie find "1" replace with ""

paste back into the batch processor for renaming.

Or if you can stand to lose the information, select all the files, right click, rename 'file' and windows will automatically rename them file (1), file (2), etc.

[Tommie]

Find a batch file processor' date='[/b'] perhaps that one, which will let me copy and paste out the filenames as one chunk of text

convert to simplified

convert to pinyin (...)

If you would know one?

Has s.o. invented such stuff already?

(...) select all the files' date=' right click, rename 'file' and windows will automatically rename them file (1), file (2), etc.

[/quote']

feasible makeshift solution for just being enabled to look at the files!

Thanks !

[imron]

First of all, it would be prudent to ask, what operating system are you running, and what version of Adobe acrobat? XP and the latest version of acrobat don't cause any problems for me. Same with OSX and acrobat.

[Tommie]

Imron,

in my office it's some Windows NT + Adobe Reader 7.0

At home I have Windows XP2003 (2003?) + AdobeReader (8?)

and cannot open the fantizi-titled PDFs.

(Not sure about jiantizi-titled PDFs.)

The funny thing I rember is , that when I FIRST got the PDFs,

I could open them, but after saving, an attempt to open would result in an error message as

' "i" - There was an error opening this document.

The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect.'

Secondly I decided now to keep pinyin numbers to minimize the information loss, despite that titles are becoming longer.

Thanks to all of you.

[imron]

What language is set as the default language for non-unicode applications? You can check this out under Start->control panel->regional and language options->advanced. Try setting this to Chinese (Taiwan) or Chinese (Hong Kong) and see if that makes a difference.

[Tommie]

Thanks for the tip , Imron.

I had Taiwan and PRC Chinese already as additional languages (and JP & KR) ,

but it was set to my mother tongue.

Now I forgot what I have changed on my laptop - but - anyway - everything works fine!

I now also can open WinRARs with Chinese names.

At work, I wonder whether it's an authoritative power right issue .

Any way, problem solved here, thread closed. Thanks!

[imron]

Yes, if you don't have administrator/power user access, you won't be able to change this setting (in fact, the Advanced tab won't even appear).