How to convert long chinese texts into character and pinyin ruby

[Graham]

Dear All,

Through this forum, I have managed to master by trial and error how to change characters into those containing pinyin ruby. However, there are a couple of problems that I cannot find my way around:

1) My computer does not automatically take the pinyin ruby one character at a time UNLESS I change the 'fit text' option to about 50 pts. Instead it takes eg all the characters between a full stop and a comma and then does the ruby on those characters. However in this fashion, the ruby eg centres over all the characters together rather than the individual characters they relate to.

2) The Asian Layout option only seems to take about a line of chinese characters despite highlighting a whole paragraph for adding pinyin.

3) If I have a lot of text, I need to change the 'Fit text' line by line, then the font of the ruby to arial unicode, then the spacing of the character to the ruby and the font size of the ruby to get what I want. If I can only do this line-by-line, it will take me hours to finish what really should be a couple of minutes of a job.

4) If I do all of the above so that I have a ruby I am satisfied with. It is not perfect, because although I can centre the ruby, I cannot centre the character under the centred ruby - the character always is left aligned.

Am I missing something here?

I'd be grateful if anyone has any answers to the above.

Many thanks in advance - Graham

[trevelyan]

I feel stupid. What is ruby?

[skylee]

I feel stupid. What is ruby?

Take a look -> Ruby字元

[Graham]

Apologies - ruby is the term used for a character which has eg its pinyin or hiragana or bopomofo or whatever written over the top/below/left or right. When most foreigners start to learn chinese characters the pinyin with tone is usually above the character or below it as an aid. In MS2000 and above, there is a function to convert characters into characters with their corresponding pinyin next to them (Format/Asian Layout/Phonetic Guide). Unfortunately, though, the function seems to have a couple of limitations as noted above which I have been unable to work around.

[knitikij]

hey graham i am also new to pin yin i was just wondering how are you converting you Chinese characters into pinyin ruby? are you using a software or doing it manually?

[skylee]

These might be useful ->

http://www.kawa.net/works/cantonese/canton.cgi/canton.cgi

http://www.chinese-forums.com/index.php?/topic/2171-instant-chinese-character-to-pinyin-conversion-in-ms-word

[Ed Log]

Chinese characters with ruby pinyin

just install this font

http://www.dynacw.co.jp/dynafont/download/data/DHE5LUA1.TTF

[HashiriKata]

Hi Ed log,

What does the font do? Why is it needed?

[tooironic]

There's also the problem of whether or not the software knows which syllable it should read in which context (e.g. 率 shuài or lǜ, 曾 zēng or céng, etc). I'm not sure if MS Word can do this - my guess is it probably doesn't?

Have you tried an online annotator like chinese-tools.com? You can paste in a passage of text and create pinyin "footers" which can then be copied and edited as you like. More work - although at least this way the characters will usually collocate with each other correctly.

[Hofmann]

That typeface has ruby Pinyin in the glyphs. There should be different versions of the typeface to account for less common pronunciations.

[tooironic]

But can it collocate words together? I didn't know a font could do that

[Ed Log]

It is just a font. What you see is what you get. OK for quick and dirty Ruby - if that is all you need.

Edited July 25, 2009 at 12:34 PM by Ed Log

[jonsl01]

hi, have you tried this tool?

http://www.chinesetransliterator.com/

[Ed Log]

http://test.pinyinannotator.com/#

[leeyah]

You can also try 汉字转换拼音 for reeeeealy long txts. It's great!