How to include Pinyin on top of each Hanzi

[babyjames]

Hello. I am a recent convert from Microsoft Office to Apple Mac. I
have loaded up most of the Chinese word processing capabilities on my
Mac, but I still can't seem to be able to find the function that
allows me to include the Pinyin on top of each Hanzi (so that one can
pronounce the Hanzi directly). Microsoft Office has this function,
which it called "phonetic guide". Thanks for your help!

[Magnus Lewan]

Your options are MS Office 2004 for Mac (similar price to PC),
NeoOffice (free) and Adobe InDesign (Asian version, very expensive).
Personally I think MS Office gives the best ratio price vs.
usability/quality.

Cheers
M

--
http://lewan.chez-alice.fr/

[TenThousandThings]

In Office 2004, to access "phonetic guides" you must activate the
advanced East Asian features using the Micrososft Language Register.
See here:

http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/applications.html#Office_2004

Note that LightWayText (a true shareware application) also supports
ruby/furigana (i.e., phonetic guides) text. At least it did last time
I checked, years ago.

http://members.aol.com/LightWayText/pad_file.htm

Eric

[babyjames]

Thank you Eric. I followed the instructions on the www.yale.edu
webpage you mentioned and dragged the Microsoft Word icon onto the
Micrsoft Language Register and altered the language to Japanese (thats
the only option...the only 2 options are English and Japanese). That
seems fine.

Thereafter, I managed to get the "phonetic guide" dropdown menu in
Microsoft Word, but using it actually gives me the Hanzi（not Pinyin)
on top of the Hanzi (ie the same Hanzi character appears on top of
that particular Hanzi). How do I get Pinyin on top, instead of the
Hanzi?

[Magnus Lewan]

I'm afraid you do not get the pinyin automatically, as you do in Word
for Windows. That is one of the sad limitations of the MacOS version
of MS Word.

In the Japanese version of MS Word for Mac you get hiragana in the
same situation, but I do not know of any version of MS Word, where you
get pinyin.

Cheers
M

--
http://lewan.chez-alice.fr/

[Eric Rasmussen]

On 8/29/07, babyjames <lee_wa...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Thereafter, I managed to get the "phonetic guide" dropdown menu in
> Microsoft Word, but using it actually gives me the Hanzi（not Pinyin)
> on top of the Hanzi (ie the same Hanzi character appears on top of
> that particular Hanzi). How do I get Pinyin on top, instead of the
> Hanzi?

You just need to change your input mode or keyboard layout when you
type into the "Ruby Text" box. Word doesn't change it for you. Use the
Input menu to do this. [Or, in the Apple Chinese input methods, you
can switch to English input mode by activating the caps lock key.] If
you want to include tone marks, you can use the U.S. Extended keyboard
layout or any of several other options (you can paste text into the
box from Wenlin, for example), and of course you need to use a font
that contains the Pinyin characters. See here:

http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/romanization.html

I don't know which alignment/distribution setting works best with
Pinyin text, so you might want to experiment with that.

PS: Word doesn't recognize IM Plug-ins, so don't bother to try
BiaoyinTXT/BiauyinTXT (which seems to have problem in 10.4.10 anyhow).

[babyjames]

Thanks heaps for your helpful hints.

I think I understand what I need to do from the references you have
provided. However my conclusion from reading all that is, with the MS
Word for Mac, to get the pinyin on top of each hanzi, I would have to
laboriously type out every single pinyin (with the tone marks too)
corresponding to each hanzi. This will be extremely inefficient if I
have a whole sentence/paragraph of hanzi!

(Unlike MS Word in Office, whereby I just need to highlight the whole
sentence/paragraph, click on a button, and the whole sentence/
paragraph of hanzi re-appears automatically with the pinyin on top of
every single word.)

Thanks again anyway for your advice.

On Aug 29, 11:21 pm, "Eric Rasmussen" <hello.ras...@gmail.com> wrote:

[TenThousandThings]

Oh, I see. I didn't understand the issue. I think one option for that
on the Mac is DimSum:

http://www.mandarintools.com/dimsum.html

I've never tried that feature, so I don't know how well it works.

Another option is MacKEY5:

http://www.cjkware.com/products.htm

I haven't used MacKEY since version 4, so again I'm not sure how well
the feature works.

ER