User:Bluedwarf/Asian Phonetic Guide

Abstract

OpenOffice.org Writer has a function for asian phonetic guide, so-called ruby, for Chinese and Japanese, which allows you to add annotative ruby characters to a corresponding Kanji string. To enter ruby on OpenOffice.org Writer, you usually open Asian Phonetic Guide dialog, however, this dialog is a little bit inconvenient.

In this page, first, the background and details of current inconvinience in that dialog are explained. Second, we look into the equivalent feature of other Office suites. At the end, some ideas for improvement of OpenOffice.org are discussed.

Background

OpenOffice.org has a good ability to split Japanese text into grammatical segments even though Japanese text doesn't have spaces between words. This separation process is doen by OpenOffice.org without user intervention. Yet this automatical separation sometimes fails due to complexity and ambiguity of the grammar. It sometimes separates text in wrong position or position which you don't expect. Unfortunately, this problem is essentially (probably) unresovable.

As a result, when you edit ruby text, you may encounter some kinds of inconvinience becase incorrectly split segments are shown in Asian Phonetic Guide dialog, which is described below.

Problems

Integration

If OOo generates smaller segments than you expect, you would try to merge two or more segements into one. However, there is not a good solution for integration of segments.

For example, here is a word "国際連合貿易開発会議" which means UNCTAD in English. Now let's try to add ruby to this word in OpenOffice.org 3.1 Writer. You will get the same result shown in the picture below. As you see, this word are recognized as the combination of 5 words, while you consider it as 1 word.

Then, to combine them into one segument, you would cut the last 4 parts and paste them together into the top text box like the picture below.

This operation results in an unexpected situation like the picture below. The 4 parts you cut and pasted would be duplicated.

Of course, there is one simple workaround that you only delete the duplicated parts, but this is quite inconvinient. It would be especially troublesome when you have a lot of wrongly separated seguments in one document.

Separation

In contrast, OOo sometimes generates longer segments than you expect. In this case, you would try to separate into a couple of segments.

For example, here is a word "東京都" which means Tokyo Metropolis. Now try to add ruby to this word in OpenOffice.org Writer. You will get the same result shown in the picture below. As you see, this word is recognized as 1 word.

However, in some conditions, you might want to separate this word into 2 parts.

To do so, you have to close Asian Phonetic Guide dialog once, select the first part and open the dialog to add ruby, and do the same thing for the second part, but you would think that this is a quite annoying operation.

Competitors

Microsoft Office Word 2003

This is ruby dialog of Microsoft Office Word 2003. When you try to add ruby text to the Japanese text "国際連合貿易開発会議", then you will see the following picture.

As you see, it results in the similar seperation to OpenOffice.org Writer, but you can see some ruby strings are already inserted, which is one different point. Microsoft Office Word 2003 has a function, which not only separates text into seguments but also suggests ruby text automatically.

Anyway, now here you try to integrate the seperated 5 words into one. In this case, you can do that only by clicking the button "文字列全体", and you will get the correct result shown below.

As to the example of "東京都", you can break this word into characters by clicking "文字単位" button.

As described above, compared to OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Word provide good functionalities to integrate or separate segments you don't like, but it's not graet enough because you can't integrate or separate them arbitrarly. The only two things you can do with Microsoft Word are to merge all segments shown into one and to split one all segments into characters. You can't set a separator in an arbitrary position.

Ichitaro

This is a very famous word processor in Japan, which is mainly forcused on Japanese text processing. As some advertisements of this product appeal the advantage of its functionality related to ruby, we should investigate it.

Unfortunately, I don't have Ichitaro, so I hope somebody report here how it deals with ruby text.

Ideas for the future

Integration and separation

Flexible integration and separation of ruby would be realized by putting "integration" and "separation" button at the right side in each ruby field. With these buttons, you could merge two adjacent segments or break apart one segment into separated characters.

Automatical suggestion of ruby

It would be great if OpenOffice.org gave ruby for Japanese text automatically. It could be realized with the help of MS-IME like Japanese_Reconversion or a morphological analyzer like MeCab library. OpenOffice.org could suggest ruby by filling out the ruby text entries in Asian Phonetic Guide dialog. This would be very helpful to add ruby. What you have to do would be to correct only wrong sugements. You could leave accurate seguments as suggested.

Automatical insertion of ruby

When you wrote one document, for example, an article for children, where you wanted to insert ruby for the whole text, it would be wonderful if OpenOffice.org inserted ruby as you typed. This could be also realized with the help of MS-IME or a morphological analyzer. In this idea, one new particular mode (it would be called "ruby insertion mode") for Writer would be required, in which you would get ruby inserted automatically as you typed.