Could you maybe add a Chinese Pinyin layout? This would not be to write Chinese characters, but to write in Pinyin. For example, not 這是拼音, but Zhè shì Pīnyīn. Currently, this does not seem to be possible, and in any way, it is not quite practical to select the accented letters.
The requirements would be really easy:
Standard 26 letters keyboard, except of an ü instead of an v (so maybe just replace the key v with ü).
Additionally, numbers 1 to 4 for the tones. If you press a number after a syllable, the tone mark will automatically be put on top of the correct letter. The above example would be written like this:
Zhe4 shi4 Pin1yin1.
The tones are shown with the following diacritics: ´, `, ˇ, ¯ (or just the plain vowel for toneless). They can be placed on top of every vowel (a,e,i,o,u,ü). So, there are also syllables like nǚ. Of course, also capital letters need to be supported, for example for words like Àomén (Macau) or if you want to write completely in capital letters (PĪNYĪN).
There are rules where the the diacritics are placed in syllables with more than one vowel (e.g. guāng)
(Source: http://www.pinyin.info/rules/where.html)* A and e trump all other vowels and always take the tone mark. There are no Mandarin syllables in Hanyu Pinyin that contain both a and e.
* In the combination ou, o takes the mark.
* In all other cases, the final vowel takes the mark.
That is basically all. It would be really nice if you could support this, because right now, there is no way to write Pinyin without having to resort to writing numbers (which is really ugly to look at). I think, the best layout would be to just put the 4 numbers on a 4th row above the other letters, because they need to be accessed with every syllable, so it is really necessary to press them with one key press (and not on the secondary level or so).
You can see a implementation of the number-to-tone method here: http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/webime2_pinyin.php
Thanks!
