Terms of Service

1. What this service is

This website is a free online tool for annotating Chinese text with pinyin. It adds pinyin above Chinese characters, applies corrections for polyphonic characters (characters with more than one reading), and converts between simplified and traditional Chinese. Results can be exported from your browser as HTML, as a Word document (.doc), or as a PDF through the browser's print dialog.

The tool is provided "as is" and free of charge. There is no account to create and nothing to pay for. There is also no backend, no database and no account system: all text processing happens inside your own browser, and anything you type or paste is never uploaded, stored or transmitted to us. As a result, we are not able to see, retrieve or delete anything you have processed on the page.

Because exports are generated locally by your browser, the quality of an export depends on your browser, fonts and print settings. We do not guarantee a particular layout across different devices or browsers.

2. Your licence to use the site

Provided you comply with these terms, you are granted a free, non-exclusive and non-transferable licence to use the tool for lawful purposes such as personal study, helping your family, classroom teaching and content creation. You may not, however:

• use the tool for anything unlawful, infringing, fraudulent or harassing, or to create or distribute material that breaches the law in your jurisdiction;
• access the site through scripts, crawlers or similar automation in bulk, harvest its pages or fire requests at scale, or otherwise impose an abnormal load on it or interfere with its normal operation;
• reverse engineer, decompile or crack the site's front-end code and assets, or remove or conceal copyright notices;
• copy and republish, resell or redistribute the site's code, page content or assets, in whole or in part, or present them as your own product or service;
• block, disable or interfere with the advertising and compliance components that the site normally displays.

If you breach these restrictions we may take whatever steps are necessary, including restricting access without prior notice.

3. Your warranty for content you submit

The tool lets you enter or paste your own text, and it lets you upload your own images as illustrations in Picture Book Studio. You warrant that you hold the necessary rights to any text, images or other material you submit, or that you have valid authorisation from the rights holder.

You must not use the tool to process material that infringes another person's copyright, trademark, likeness or privacy; copyright-protected works that you have not been licensed to use, such as novels, textbooks, exam papers or newspaper articles; or anything unlawful, violent, sexual, defamatory or otherwise objectionable.

Since all processing is local to your browser, we neither receive your content nor review it. You are therefore solely responsible and legally liable for what you submit and for the consequences of submitting it. Any dispute, claim or loss arising from your content is a matter between you and the affected party, and we accept no responsibility for it.

4. Ownership of what you produce

The material you generate with this tool — annotated passages, worksheets, picture book layouts and exported files — belongs to you. We claim no ownership, no copyright and no licence over your output, and we do not ask for credit or a share of anything you make with it.

You remain responsible, of course, for making sure the underlying material you worked from is lawfully sourced. In other words, the tool does not change the rights you already had, and it does not grant you rights you did not have.

5. Intellectual property

The page structure, interface design, written explanations, front-end scripts and stylesheets of this website, together with the name and logo of Pinyin Tool, belong to the site operator and are protected by applicable law. They may not be used for any of the purposes prohibited in section 2.

The tool is built with publicly available open-source libraries and reference data, such as character pronunciation data. Those components remain under their own open-source licences, and their names, marks and licences belong to their respective authors or organisations. Our use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by them. Licence details and attributions are set out in the site's third-party notices.

6. Third-party advertising and external links

This site displays third-party advertising through Google AdSense to cover the cost of running it, such as domain and hosting fees. Ads are served automatically by the advertising system, and their presence does not constitute a recommendation or endorsement of any product, service or viewpoint by us. Advertising may use cookies or similar technologies; see the Privacy Policy for details.

Pages on this site may also link to external websites, for example reference material or third-party policy pages. Those sites are run independently by others. We do not control their content, availability or privacy practices, and we are not responsible for their content or for any loss arising from them. When you follow an external link, please make your own assessment and observe that site's terms.

7. Disclaimer: accuracy of annotations

Pinyin annotation, polyphonic character correction and simplified/traditional conversion on this site are all automated results. We continually refine the dictionaries and decision rules behind them, but Chinese contains a great many polyphonic characters, proper nouns, literary readings, regional pronunciations and technical terms, and no automated tool can be one hundred per cent accurate. Occasional errors are normal.

You should therefore check annotations yourself before relying on them. This matters most in teaching, exam preparation, publishing, official documents and any material released to the public, where accuracy is critical: verify the readings one by one and, where necessary, defer to an authoritative dictionary, textbook or professional publication. Any consequence of using an incorrect annotation without checking rests with the user.

We do not warrant that the service will always be available, uninterrupted or free of errors, or that it is fit for your particular purpose.

8. Changes to and suspension of the service

This is a free service run by an individual. We may add, adjust, suspend or discontinue all or part of it at any time — changing the interface, replacing dictionaries, altering export formats, or taking the whole site offline — without prior notice, and without liability to you or to any third party.

For important material, please export and save your results promptly rather than relying on this site as your only copy or backup.

One specific warning: books created in Picture Book Studio are saved in your own browser storage. Clearing your browser data, switching browsers, or working in private browsing mode may lose a draft. Use "Export project" to keep a backup of anything important — we cannot recover a draft held on your device.

9. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, we are not liable in any circumstances for indirect, incidental, special or punitive losses arising from your use of, or inability to use, the service. This includes lost profits, lost data, delays in teaching or publishing schedules, and third-party claims.

Because the service is free, our total liability to you is, to the extent the law allows, zero. If the law of your jurisdiction does not permit some liability to be excluded or limited, that limitation will not apply there, and the remaining terms will continue in effect.

10. Changes to these terms

We may revise these terms from time to time to reflect changes in the service or in the law. A revised version will be published on this page and takes effect on the date it is posted. Continuing to use the service after an update means you accept the revision; if you do not agree with it, please stop using the site. We suggest checking this page periodically for the current version.

11. Governing law and contact

These terms, and their formation, validity, interpretation and any dispute arising from them, are governed by the laws of the country or region in which the site operator is based. In the event of a dispute, the parties should first attempt to resolve it through good-faith discussion.

If you have a question, an objection or a rights claim relating to these terms, contact us at connorlin072@gmail.com. We will respond within a reasonable time.