Classical Texts (7)

Open the app — Korean Studies Toolkit (Chrome Web Store) What do you do when an unfamiliar word appears in a classical text? Open a new tab, type the dictionary address, retype the word, then find your way back. A date shows up, so you open another tab. Ten tabs later you have lost the line you were reading. Korean Studies Toolkit removes that round trip. It is a Chrome extension that docks three tools to the right of your browser: the Korean Studies Web Dictionary, the East Asian Chronology and the Unicode Hanja IME. Your page stays where it is; you look things up beside it. ...

Open the app — Korean Studies Web Dictionary When an unfamiliar word turns up in an old text, one dictionary is rarely enough. It is not in the hanja dictionary, so you open an idu glossary; not there either, so you try the medical terminology list, and end up in an encyclopedia. Half a dozen tabs later, you have lost the sentence you were reading. This dictionary searches more than twenty sources at once. One query, and every dictionary carrying that word appears on a single screen. There are 1.42 million headwords. ...

Open the app — Unicode Hanja IME Have you ever been transcribing an old text and come to a full stop at a character you cannot read? Korean input converts hanja from its reading, so without the reading you cannot even open the conversion list. And once you have dug the reading out of a dictionary, the character is often missing from the list anyway. The built-in converter on Windows mostly covers the basic block. Characters from the extension blocks — common in classical texts — never show up. ...

Open the app — Classical Edition Comparison Anyone who has collated editions knows the routine. Three different editions of the same book, spread open, hunting for the same leaf in each and matching character by character. Open three PDF viewer windows and every time you turn one you have to find and turn the others. Spot a variant character and there’s nowhere to mark it, so you end up noting it in a separate memo. ...

Open the app — PDF Left-Right Splitter Open a scanned classical text from a library and more often than not it was photographed with the book lying open. Two pages on one sheet. On paper that feels natural, but on a screen or a tablet the characters end up half size. The page numbers are half the real count too, so every citation needs arithmetic. This tool cuts such PDFs down the middle and separates them into single pages. It sounds simple, but in practice plenty of things get in the way. The cover is a single sheet yet gets sliced in half, vertically written books must be read right to left, and characters near the binding get cut off. Each of those has its own setting here. ...

Open the app — PDF Page Reverser Have you ever scanned a classical Chinese book? A right-bound volume reads from right to left, so feeding it into the scanner in order gives you a file that comes out backwards. The last leaf ends up as page 1. The same thing happens when a sheet feeder pulls pages from the back. The scan itself is fine — only the order is flipped — so there’s no reason to scan it again. ...

Open the app — Tag Converter Have you ever done collation work on a classical text? That screen where the original is packed solid with <note>, <title>, <quote> and the rest. By the time the tags outnumber the characters, the actual text stops registering. Strip the tags, though, and you lose the structure. What you need isn’t to remove the tags but to see them less intrusively. This tool turns tags into color, font size, and underline. Instead of the literal word <note> you get small grey type; a title becomes large bold type. The source stays as it is and only the display changes, so you can review and fix in the same place. ...