How to type pinyin text with tone marks in Windows?
May I suggest my own PinyinTones IME, which does exactly what the OP was looking for:
- https://www.pinyintones.com/
It's a Windows IME that outputs Pinyin with tone marks, rather than Chinese characters. Type 1, 2, 3, or 4 after each syllable to add a tone mark -- just as people have been entering Pinyin since the days of ASCII characters:
Key features:
Uses the Text Services Framework, so it works everywhere that the Microsoft Pinyin IME works. Including desktop and Universal applications.
Uses in-line text composition, just like the Microsoft IMEs. This means that it behaves well in TSF-aware applications -- for example, when inserting, text will reflow as you type.
Automatically places tone marks on the correct vowel in a combination, according to the rules of Pinyin orthography. (e.g., hao3 becomes hǎo -- with the tone mark on the "a" rather than on the "o")
You can use the Keyboard Layout Creator to create such a keyboard layout yourself. Off the top of my head I don't know a layout which enables you to type all the tones. As Bkkbrad mentioned, you can't type a macron on US International (which is what I'm using here). But modifying US International to add another dead key for macron shouldn't be too hard.
I've used a couple but in the end I went with QuickPinyin because it's the only one that didn't need to be installed. This is kind of cool because I can run from a USB stick on any PC, for example, the library computers which don't let me install software on them.