Pinyin is a romanization system for Chinese characters. While you can type in pinyin using an IME (Input Method Editor) such as Fcitx (installable via the Welcome application) to display Chinese characters on screen, there seems to be no program for GNU/Linux-based operating systems to type pinyin with tone marks (there are four different tones in Chinese which are displayed with different marks or accents). In Windows I have used the program Pinyinput to solve this task. The Sourceforge page can be found here. Does anyone know of a comparable alternative that runs under Ubuntu MATE?
I am not a developer but I am curious whether a fork from a Windows program would be technically possible and whether its license (GNU General Public License version 2.0, GPLv2) would permit this.