Speaking as someone with only elementary school level PTH, it is a pain to type Chinese using pinyin.

The deal is, you need to know exactly what a character sounds like in PTH in order to be able to type it out with pinyin.

This is obviously a bit of a problem with me as I don't even bloody well know what most characters are supposed to sound like! So my strategy is to use the good old trial-and-error method. If "que" is not it then try "ce" or "xe" or "zhe" or "che"!

Still, about 400 characters share the same pinyin of "zhe", so even when you get the pinyin right you still need to scroll through line after line of characters to find the one you want. I found this website which is mighty useful for my purposes but still it is a laborious process.

I am pleased that I managed to send off 4/5s of my promised three chapters to the publisher yesterday afternoon. And now I shall need to think about the other three.