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Tone markers are of limited use to Chinese readers (instead, just show them the characters).

They are also of limited use to non-Chinese readers, who don't understand the tone system and probably can't even audibly distinguish tones.

So, it makes sense that we get this weird system even though it's strictly worse.

Yes, this is very annoying, because how Pinyin works. There were a lot mistakes made when using Pinyin in English content. Pinyin suppose to break at character level, Pinyin = Pin Yin, you can easily write it as Pin-Yin, or Pin Yin, but Pinyin is just wrong.

Hun Yuan is a lot better. I agree, with unicode, we can easily incorporate the tone.

I don't understand why this vietnamese-style writing isn't the most popular pinyin. It's clearly superior to putting numbers inside words.