Media
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Description
Type romaji, get hiragana or katakana. A floating pad for writing Japanese kana without an IME. Hangil Kana Pad is a small floating keyboard for writing Japanese hiragana and katakana on a computer with no Japanese IME installed. Click the toolbar icon and a compact window opens, detached from the browser. Type romaji, watch it become kana as you go, then press Ctrl+Enter and it is on your clipboard. Nothing to install at the OS level, nothing to configure, no kanji conversion getting in the way. konnichiha → こんにちは ra-men → ラーメン (katakana mode) WHAT IT DOES • Live romaji to kana. Conversion happens as you type, one mora at a time. Incomplete input stays visible as romaji — "ky" sits there until you finish it with "kyo" → きょ — so nothing ever silently disappears. • Hiragana / katakana switch. The switch changes what you type next; text already in the box is never re-converted. Mixing あ and ア in one line is just a matter of flipping it mid-sentence. • A window that stays open. A normal toolbar popup closes the moment it loses focus, which is the wrong behavior here — the whole point is to type kana and then click into another window to paste. This is a real free-floating window. It stays put, and it remembers its size and position. • Your choice of Japanese font and text size. Five families — Gothic ゴシック体, Mincho 明朝体, Rounded 丸ゴシック体, Textbook 教科書体, and Monospace 等幅 — and 18 to 56 px. Kana is set large by default, because the people who need this tool are usually still learning to read it. Textbook style shows the stroke shapes the way they are taught for handwriting. • Full-width spaces. The space bar writes (U+3000), the space an IME writes in Japanese input mode. Shift+Space gives the ASCII one — again, the way an IME does it. • Your text stays put. Close the window, open it again, your text is still there. Settings follow your browser profile, so the same preferences show up on your other machines. THE ん FIX A real Japanese IME reads "onna" as ん + な and gives you おんな. Most romaji converters read the doubled n greedily and hand you おんあ, forcing a third n. Hangil Kana Pad rewrites the input the way an IME would, so the spellings you learned elsewhere work here: onna → おんな konnichiha → こんにちは tanni → たんに nihonn → にほん Everywhere else it follows the standard IME romaji table rather than trying to be clever, including where that table is inconvenient — "konnyaku" gives こんやく, and こんにゃく wants "kon'nyaku", exactly as in MS-IME or Google IME. Both Hepburn and kunrei spellings are accepted: shi/si, chi/ti, tsu/tu, fu/hu, ji/zi all work. A trailing n is left on screen as romaji while you type, because it is still undecided. It settles into ん the moment you type a space, start a new line, click away, or copy. KEYBOARD Alt+Shift+K Open the pad from anywhere in the browser Enter A new line, always Ctrl+Enter Copy Ctrl+C Copy everything — or just the selection, if there is one Ctrl+K Switch between hiragana and katakana Space A full-width space Shift+Space An ordinary ASCII space Ctrl+U Delete from the start of the line to the cursor Ctrl+Shift+Backspace Clear the pad (Ctrl+Z brings it back) Esc Close the window, keeping your text The opening shortcut is rebindable at chrome://extensions/shortcuts. INTERFACE LANGUAGES English, 日本語, 한국어, 简体中文, 繁體中文 and ไทย. The pad follows your browser's language by default, and a setting overrules it — because plenty of learners run an English browser while wanting a Japanese interface, or the reverse. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO It converts kana only. There is no kanji conversion, no dictionary and no candidate list. That is a deliberate limit, not a missing feature: it keeps the window to one text box, and it keeps the permissions to almost nothing. PRIVACY Two permissions, and that is the whole list: storage, to remember your text and settings, and clipboardWrite, to copy. The extension has no access to any web page, no host permissions, and makes no network requests at all. The fonts come from your own computer rather than being loaded from the web. Nothing you type leaves your machine. FREE Free, and it stays that way. Every feature is in the extension from the moment you install it — no account, no trial, no upgrade. There is a tip jar at the foot of the settings panel for anyone who wants to say thanks, and it is a link and nothing more: no reminders, no counting, and nothing held back behind it. Romaji parsing by WanaKana (MIT), © WaniKani / Tofugu LLC. Help, keyboard reference and support: https://hangil.app/hangil-kana-pad.html