How do I type Chinese pinyin text with the tone marks into any application in Windows?
I am aware of the Chinese IME in Windows, which converts pinyin text I type into the Chinese stroked characters. This is not what I want. I want to type and view pinyin text, like rì chū for example, with all the proper tone marks (diacritics).
Best Answer
The U.S. international keyboard that comes with Windows makes typing some accents easy, but apparently not macrons (the bar over the "u" in "chū"). The Māori keyboard has support for those; maybe you can hot switch between the two? Someone claimed to have made a derivative of the international keyboard that permits typing the macrons as well as other accents easily, but I haven't tried it out.
You could try using a tone converter that takes in numeric-based tones and spits out accent-based tones.
Edit:
I found an explicitly pinyin keyboard layout that should do what you want.