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On my iPod (iOS 4.1), I'm often browsing Japanese webpages, and while I can usually understand the meaning, I often don't know the readings, especially in new contexts.

For my desktop web browsers, there are various ways to get it to display furigana for the webpage you're looking at: the Furigana Inserter extension, a bookmarklet to hiragana.jp, etc.

Does iOS Safari support extensions, or bookmarklets, or any other mechanism by which I can have it add furigana? I can manually copy the URL, and go to hiragana.jp and paste it, and it looks great when it's all done, but the process is manual and slow. Alternatively, is there any built-in furigana support, for Safari or any other app? (If there is it's probably well-hidden, but it wouldn't be the first well-hidden part of iOS!)

I'm not too concerned at this point about whether it's built-in functionality, or whether it has to send my webpage unencrypted over the internet to a service. It would be really nice if it was local-only and secure, but at this point I'll take anything.

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  • Dredging this question up from the archives, since I found it while looking for related stuff... in iOS 8 apps can provide extensions that change the content of a Safari page (for example, the Bing app offers language translation) — and the Safari share/action button is a lot easier to reach than a bookmarklet. I haven't seen any third party apps that do furigana yet, but maybe someone will make one eventually?
    – rickster
    Commented Feb 2, 2015 at 20:03

1 Answer 1

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You can use a bookmarklet. Just sync your Safari or Firefox bookmarks with iTunes. Every bookmarklet you have on the desktop will be available on mobile Safari on the iPhone.

Or you can add the bookmarklet directly from within mobile Safari on the iPhone:

Step 1: Select the line bellow and copy it:

javascript:void(document.location='http://trans.hiragana.jp/ruby/'+escape(document.location))

Step 2: Navigate to hiragana.jp and tap on the '+' button to save a bookmark

Step 3: tap on the bookmarks icon then on 'Edit'

Step 4: Select the bookmark you just added

Step 5: tap on the address, then on the gray 'x' to clear the field

Step 6: tap that field again and select 'Paste'

Step 7: you're done

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  • Do as above, but it does not work, nothing happened. Do you mean to add a bookmark with a address "javascript:void(document.location=’trans.hiragana.jp/ruby’+escape(document.location)) " And when we go into the page we want to translate then press the bookmark? I did not but it did not work at all.
    – Gobi
    Commented Dec 6, 2010 at 3:34
  • It works very nicely - but you have to manually replace the ' symbol in the bookmark, because copy/paste changes this symbol into a series of digits and % that are not recognized
    – user6778
    Commented May 27, 2011 at 3:48

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