How to Format a Chinese eBook with pinyin

[verydeepwater]

I have a Word document in Chinese with the pinyin characters above each character. (These are the phonetic rendering of the Chinese to help recognition of the characters - as used by Chinese Children learning to read.) The pinyin need to sit directly above the correct character.

By converting the file in Calibre, you can get close to the desired result by using a suitable font, and positioning the pinyin correctly above the characters by using a span tag for each Chinese character and another span tag for each pinyin. The characters are positioned by setting the span tag to vertical align:bottom, and a left margin of -0.7em and the span for the pin yin set to vertical-align:top and a positive left-margin.

This method uses a huge number of span tags, and I wonder if this is the correct method or if anyone knows a better way.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by verydeepwater

This method uses a huge number of span tags, and I wonder if this is the correct method or if anyone knows a better way.

In epub3 epubs and Kindle azw3 books, you could use ruby markup.

[verydeepwater]

[QUOTE=Doitsu;3007323]In epub3 epubs and Kindle azw3 books, you could use ruby markup..

Thanks very much for this, it took me a while to try this but now I have. Quite amazing actually, but I am still having a problem using the text exported from the Word file in a way that the necessary tags can be added without having to re-type the whole thing.

The original was in Microsoft Word, with the pinyin above the corresponding character - formatted in Microsoft Chinese proofing tools, which I don't have installed. As I mentioned, by converting this with Calibre, you can get an html file with each character marked by a span tag. It would be possible to replace each span tag to mark all the pinyin text with <rt> </rt> and the Chinese characters with <rb> </rb> as in the Ruby coding in your link. The trouble is that the html text produced from the word file is not in the desired order. It seems the Ruby formatting needs the base to come first<rb>, followed by the corresponding pinyin marked as <rt>. In the html file, produced from the Word file, the text on the top comes first, always followed by the text which is underneath. Thus you would basically need to re-type or cut and paste very word to get things in the desired order.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by verydeepwater

The original was in Microsoft Word, with the pinyin above the corresponding character - formatted in Microsoft Chinese proofing tools, which I don't have installed. As I mentioned, by converting this with Calibre, you can get an html file with each character marked by a span tag.

Have you tried to export the Chinese Word file as a "filtered Web Page" with Word? This might create an .html file with ruby tags. If it doesn't generate ruby tags, the Calibre DOCX-to-EPUB converter won't generate ruby tags either.

If it does generate ruby tags, you may want to ask about this conversion issue in the Calibre Conversion forum. If Kovid Goyal considers this a bug, he might be able to fix this conversion issue for the next release.

BTW, you could simply use a regular expression search in Calibre Editor or Sigil to add the required ruby tags.

If you post a line from the original document, the same line converted by Calibre and the format that you need, either Calibre or Sigil users will post the required regular expressions.

[verydeepwater]

Saving the file as filtered html does produce html with perfect Ruby code, as you suggest. I hadn't imagined there could be such a simple solution. Thank you for your help.