hanzigrid 0.1

Generate a Chinese character grid for study

This is the command line tool that generated the above chinese character study grids, and with which you can create your own study grids.

• SVG images - great for printing, making your own chinese character poster and hanging it on your wall!

• An interactive HTML page (using the SVG images - for study on computers or mobile devices. There’s also Javascript/JSON output which you can immediately reuse in your own applications.

The tool is fed a list of input characters (a plain text file), and it will look up each character in HSK level 1 to 6 and draw it on the grid along with additional information. This means you can use it to generate custom grids with exactly the characters you want and in the order you want.

Features

• Characters can be assigned a colour corresponding to the tone (1 - red, 2 - yellow, 3 - green, 4 - blue). Characters that have multiple readings, are neutral tone, or for which no pinyin could be found (if they’re not in HSK) are always shown in black.

• HSK levels can be indicated by cell background colour (HSK1-3: white, HSK4: light grey; HSK5: yellow, HSK6: red, not in HSK: dark grey). This may act as a cue for you to skip the character until you’re proficient in the lowel levels.

• Example words from the HSK lexicon are shown (up to two in the images). In the interactive form, click a character words in which they occur.

• Showing pinyin on the grid is supported (but not enabled by default)

• Pinyin ordering is supported (not enabled by default)

• The alternative character (simlified/traditional) can be shown in the bottom-right corner of the cell.

• You can determines the columns/rows/cell sizes.

Installation

Familiarity with Python and the command line is assumed if you want to use this tool to make your own hanzi grids, install hanzigrid using pip as follows:

pip install hanzigrid

Usage

See hanzigrid --help

Notes

The interactive page HTML outputted by this tool has to be served from a proper webserver, serving locally from file:/// will not work well!