Does anyone know of a programmatic method to add Furigana to a large amount of text, even better if it can utilize the WK API? I am completely open to copy and pasting the text into an editor or other window, but would like to preserve as much of the original formatting as possible.
I’m blessed with having more access to original, native, Japanese content than most people. However I’m not as blessed with available time.
I am a Senior Manager over a few departments in a Japanese company with a location in the States. I consistently work with Japanese folks from various professional departments (Sales, R&D, Technical groups, Customers, Production, Quality, etc.) so I have many many many all Japanese documents come across my desk.
I do some programming (mainly Python, some C) and have worked on specific aspects of this before, but my amateur skills have not produced reliable or even usable results, and I am severely crunched for time between work and family.
I know the furigana is Ruby based so there is not a real method to make it work in all programs (i.e. PowerPoint, Excel). I’ve scoured the community and found some that looked promising, but most were not available any longer. NihongoDera - Furigana Maker is the closest I’ve found, but it lacks the WK tie-in.
I’m hoping someone here knows of a new, cool tool I haven’t been able to find yet.
I use japanese.io to drop in text into a window and add furigana.
I use the paid version which has “adaptive furigana”. The idea is that it it only selectively adds furigana based on your knowledge. I’m not sure how the sauce is made, but somehow it judges this based on your reading history (which words you hover over to check the reading / meaning), JLPT level, Wanikani API token, etc.
It’s not perfect, but it’s the best I’ve found. Couple of observations on using it:
It maintains some formatting, but you’ll lose pictures, charts, etc.
The adaptive furigana logic is fuzzy to me. I find that it is conservative and adds more furigana than I need, including furigana for some kanji that I’ve already learned in Wankikani.
There is a browser extension called Yomichan which lets you look up vocab on mouse hover. I haven’t used it myself but if you put your texts and stuff into Google Docs or something, then it should work, I guess? And it would be even faster than adding furigana and using a dictionary.
This isn’t true actually, the reason ruby tags are called that, is that they are named that in typography.
There certainly are extensions that do something similar to what you want like this one though not sure how well they work. I would probably second the yomichan idea, as you really don’t want everything to have furigana (it pushes the content around, and makes you not think about the reading)