You're doing it completely wrong. Fractions are exactly for what they're named: showing fractions, with a line in between at the baseline
I guess there is no easy way. Does other publishing tools like Pagemaker does have any tricks on its sleeve?
There are ways to achieve that in any decent editing tools, for example MS Office, Libre Office, Hancom Office... and of course even TeX. In fact you'd find the answer immediately if you've googled something like "MS Word phonetic guide"
Even html supports it with the <ruby>
tag and CSS also has the Ruby Styling Module. The tag is meant for Ruby character which are commonly used in East Asian texts for phonetic guides but of course it can be used for any languages. The linked wikipedia article also uses <ruby>
tag (just look at the page source) so you can see the examples clearly in your browser
The ruby characters appears above the base word, and can be adjust to lie on top of a single letter or a group of letters easily. Unfortunately superuser's simple html doesn't support ruby tag, but many other language stackexchange communities like Japanese have special ways to write it in markdown as explained here
To add it in MS Word just select the text to add ruby and click "Phonetic guide" in the Home/Font group
The feature is generally available for East Asian languages, so if it doesn't appear on your ribbon then just right click on the ribbon > Customize the Ribbon... and add the "Phonetic guide" button to the Home > Font group, or you can add one East Asian language to the preferences list
The ruby text is also represented as an equation field code. If you press Alt+F9 or go to Preferences > View and check Show > "Field code" (or right click on the annotated text > Toogle Field Codes) you'll see it's encoded as something like
EQ \* jc2 \* "Font:Yu Mincho" \* hps48 \o\ad(\s\up 47(Tōkyō),東京)
Here jc
is the ruby style, for example jc5
is a vertical ruby text, hps
is the font size of the ruby text (48pt in this case) and 47 after \up
is the distance to move above. However most of the parameters are optional except the vertical distance. So the minimum you can have is like this
EQ \o\ad(\s\up 20(ruby text),main text)
Just press Ctrl+F9, paste the code, adjust the distance and then Alt+F9
It's also possible to add ruby text automatically using VBA but probably you're not interested in it anyway
See also
Best Answer
I can replicate this problem, but do not know the cause.
To fix it, I think you will have to change the text in the EQ fields that Word uses for this feature. (FWIW I thought Word had stopped using EQ fields for this a while ago, but apparently not). I'm not even sure that will work consistently.
For example, Word might insert an EQ field like this. In this case, "123" is the Ruby Text and the Ha (sorry, I do not know much about the Devanagari writing system!) is the body text :
The
\* hps9
is supposed to set the size of the Ruby Text to 9 half-points, i.e. 4.5 points. But it doesn't. If I do the same thing using text that's all in the Calibri font (for example) it works. But I also see that in that case, the "123" is formatted as the correct size, and in fact the ability to format text in an EQ field is probably how to work around this problem.Personally, I think this is an error ("bug") in Word, and you should really bring it to Microsoft's attention, e.g. using Word's smiley mechanism, if you have that, or word.uservoice.com. Perhaps someone there has already mentioned it. But I suppose there could be some reason why Devanagari fonts are treated differently.
Anyway, The thing that seemed to work here was to format the
9(123)
(starting with the space) with the font and size that you want. It might be simpler in Find/Replace to change the size of the whole\up <n>()
instruction, in this caseup 9(123)
. It might also be helpful to create character styles with specific font sizes and apply those styles instead of direct formatting, in case you need to change them later.That said, at one point, the EQ field seemed to "honor" both the directly applied formatting and the
\* hps
field by reducing the Ruby text size even further. So it may make sense to delete the\* hps<size>
part as well.NB, the
\* jc<n>
,\* "Font:something"
and\* hps<n>
switches were created to help format Ruby text and most documentation of the \EQ field does not describe them. There is further information at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/murrays/word-eq-field-and-east-asian-formatting (Incidentally, the author of that article, Murray Sargent, seems to have been heavily involved in most of Microsoft's layout features for 20 years or so, so it's interesting that even he was not sure about some of the information in that article). His documentation for the regular EQ field instructions is at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/murrays/microsoft-word-eq-field