Hey Skritterati -

I'm in a phase where I'm capturing lots of sentences from native Chinese media sources, and dumping them in Anki.

Typing the pinyin is a big PITA, esp. getting the first and third tone marks easily.

Anybody have online tools that you use to generate a string of pinyin from 漢字 input?

Need to be able to paste in the 漢字, copy and paste the pinyin. The pinyin needs to have tone marks indicated inline (as accent marks).

Would have thought this stuff would be dime a dozen but am really failing to come up with anything simple and convenient. A website would be ideal.

Sometimes just resort to pasting into MDBG and copying out the pinyin bit by bit.

I know I must be doing this wrong. Somebody clue me in pls!

http://mandarinspot.com/annotate

Which version of Anki? I believe it worked with the last one - I entered several sentences and got the pinyin with tone marks - although I think I have just accidentally updated. You could do a search of the Anki forums.
Possibly Google Translate will do this too.

Awesome, thanks! Had not found the mandarinspot.com - looks like that'll do the trick.

I'm sure Google translate MUST do this, but am not quite seeing where to make that happen...

Had tried a Chinese plugin for Anki 2.0 - but at least at the time it was in beta and did some peculiar things to my Anki setup that took a while to back out. Without a background of Anki geekery it seemed like was causing more problems than it solved, since all I needed was the pinyin.

That was where I read it yesterday:
http://eastasiastudent.net/china/putonghua/google-translate-pinyin-practice-writing/

Knew I must have been missing something. 感謝你們的幫助！

i just use the google online translation tool. it shows the translation into English as well as the Chinese Pinyin.

Wenlin.
Edit/Make Transformed Copy.../Pinyin transcription

The program is expensive as hell, though. I am still waiting for them to go open source, but things aren't moving all that fast. I think they still have a free demo on their website, you should try it out.