How to Type Characters for Phonetic Guide Over a Word in Microsoft Word

microsoft wordtext formatting

I am trying to prepare a small document in Sanskrit language. The text that I am trying to type are very well available with my Windows 8 OS and I could type them fairly well.

However, my requirement is that I am preparing this document as a guide to read and as well as pronounce correctly. The pronunciation symbols followed are as ancient as the language and are similar to the IPA.

To put all my need in English, assume I want to type something like this:

The numbers, alphabets, symbols that is seen in the first line with small font size are phonetic guide and the text "Sample" in the second line is the actual text.

I have no problem in typing the second line. But it is time consuming for me to type and place the characters in the first line using text box as this is the only way I figured to achieve the result. As it can been seen this is very tedious and more importantly all those efforts goes waste if the second line is edited.

So, my question: Is there any easy way for me accomplish the above at the same time allow me to edit the text in both lines?

Clarification:

A sample (and actual) text that I am trying to type is:
The second line is a word that has to be hymned with specified octave on first, last but one and last alphabet. The octave is mentioned as numerals in the first line (reading 1, 0 and 3 from left to right). 0^th octave is the highest not silence 😉

I am not expecting the word processor to do any automation nor I do not want any macro support as well. After posting this question I stumbled on field code for equation and it would be easy if I can do something like with equation editor by invoking it with field code { EQ \f(1,S) }.

The sample text typed as equation fraction field:

$Equation fraction field$

results in:

The disadvantages are:

No kerning.
Line between numerator and denominator – can't be removed.
Equal size of font for both parts of fraction.

I guess there is no easy way. Does other publishing tools like Pagemaker does have any tricks on its sleeve?

Best Answer

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

Related Solutions

Word – Adding a punctuation mark (comma, period) after a Word 2013 equation in display style

Microsoft simply hasn't implemented a nice solution to this problem (just like equation numbering, which requires a 1-by-3 invisible table!). The only reasonable solution is your "second approach", that is, putting the punctuation mark inside the formula. I always do that.

[Besides, Microsoft Word and semantics -- you simply cannot be this pedantic in Microsoft Word. Personally, I am seriously considering abandoning Microsoft Word in favour of HTML5+CSS3, which is superior in most ways. Unfortunately, there is no convenient and standardised way of entering math in HTML.]

Word – How to adjust the ruby text height

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 :

{EQ \* jc2 \* "Font:Mangal" \* hps9 \o\ad(\s\up 9(123),ह)}

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 case up 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

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Word – Adding a punctuation mark (comma, period) after a Word 2013 equation in display style

Word – How to adjust the ruby text height

Related Question