⚙️ How to use Yomichan on PDFs ⚙️

How to bypass add-on restrictions in web browsers and enable automatic word lookup

Recently, I discovered the site huayuworld.org and I downloaded for free a bunch of children books on Taiwanese customs, Chinese problems and riddles from it 😋

Since most of these PDFs are searchable (in other words, they have text that can be selected on them), I was excited to use Yomichan to read them and mine words 🤩. However, when I tried opening them on different web browsers (Firefox, Google Chrome), I realized the add-on wasn’t working! 😵

❓Wait, what is Yomichan ❓

For those of you that do not know about this wonderful tool, basically Yomichan is a browser add-on that allows you to quickly look up words in Japanese (and also in Chinese too, read more about it here ➡️ Yomichan setup for Chinese).

Among its multiple functionalities, my favorite one is its integration with Anki, which allows you to create new cards with a simple click 🖱️. You can find a tutorial on how to do this on the Animecards website.

💡 The solution to use it on PDFs 💡

Now, let’s talk about how to make this work on PDFs. So, after browsing around 🤔, I found on Github an issue report for another add-on https://github.com/birchill/10ten-ja-reader/issues/47 which proposed the following workaround:

1. Go to the following site: https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/web/viewer.html

2. Open the menu, click on “Open” and select the file you want to read.

3. That’s it! Wasn’t that easy? 😊 You can now use Yomichan on this PDF reader to read this type of files and mine some words 😉

Happy reading and see you again with more valuable content,

~𝙽𝚊𝚝𝚑𝚊