Show HN: Nihongo Safari Extension – Add Furigana to Japanese Webpages on iOS

Hey HN! I’m the creator of the Nihongo Safari Extension, a new tool that can add furigana or romaji to Japanese webpages from within Safari on iOS. It will also make all of the words on the page tappable, so that you can tap them and view the definition without leaving Safari. When you tap on the definition, it will jump over to the main Nihongo dictionary app where you can see example sentences, related words, etc.

It’s kind of like rikai-chan (the old firefox extension), but since it uses the same natural language processing that Nihongo uses for its Clippings feature, it can take into account more of the context of the page, and give more accurate results. Plus, it doesn’t look like it was built in 1997 :P

Under the hood, it uses a Safari Action Extension to grab all the text elements from the page, import them into native code, and run them through my parser. I then generate HTML with <ruby> tags for each piece of text, and inject it back into the page via JavaScript. I inject the bootstrap popover library into the page, and configure each word with a bootstrap popover of its definition.

I bundled the extension in with the Japanese dictionary & study app I publish called Nihongo, which I posted on here a couple years back. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094326).

Would love to hear your feedback, or answer any questions!