Dealing with Japanese text in Word 98 (English version)

[David Averbach]

I apologize in advance for posting this unsolicited computer-related 
advice on non-computer topic-related newsgroups, and I further 
apologize for multiple postings you may receive.

For those of you who use Word 98 and JLK on a Macintosh, you may have 
found yourself in a frustrating position when you switched over from 
WordPerfect or NissusWriter or whatever other word processing program 
you had been using.  Since Word is a superior program in so many 
ways, not to mention the "death" of WordPerfect for Mac, there really 
is no going back.  Yet still, although Word now supports Japanese 
characters, there are a lot of annoying faults that turn something as 
simple as inputting occasion Japanese into an English manuscript into 
a nightmare.  I've had a lot of people ask me how to get around some 
of the problems they've encountered, and after some research, I now 
have some answers.  Basically there's some good news (i.e. solutions) 
and bad news (the old sho-ga-nai situation).

But first, let me tell you how impressed I was with the Japanese 
version of Word 98 that I was able to try out recently.  I don't know 
yet how it handles English-related issues, such as spelling and 
grammar, but yappari Japanese text comes out beautifully.  You can 
even transform a whole section from yokogaki to tategaki with the 
click of a single button!  And there's a built-in rubi (furigana) 
funcition too.  I'm going to do more research on how well the 
localized version of Word works with an English-language system, and 
I'll have more on that in upcoming weeks.  But for those of you who 
are stuck with the English version for now, here is an outline of 
some problems and possible workarounds.

Problem 1:	Paragraphs with mixed English and Japanese text tend 
to wrap longer Japanese text onto its own line.

Problem 2:	Miscellaneous punctuation, like periods, commas and 
quotation marks don't automatically get pushed into their proper 
places (either at the end or beginning of the line, depending on 
which)

Problem 3:	Can you gloss text with furigana in Word 98?

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Problem 1:	Paragraphs with mixed English and Japanese text tend 
to wrap longer Japanese text onto its own line.

I used to put (English) spaces at the end of lines of Japanese 
text-the problem was that if I made a change, I'd have to re-do the 
whole thing.  A better way is to change all the spaces that occur 
before the Japanese text starts to something called nonbreaking 
spaces.  You can do this by doing a search and replace.  Go into 
Edit-->Replace? and in the "Find What" section put a space.  Click on 
the "More" button on the right hand side and place your cursor in the 
"Replace With" box.  Select "Nonbreaking space" in the Special Menu 
below.  You should replace each space individually, because if you do 
a replace all, it will change all the spaces in your whole document. 
This should solve the problem.

Problem 2:	Miscellaneous punctuation, like periods, commas and 
quotation marks don't automatically get pushed into their proper 
places (either at the end or beginning of the line, depending on 
which)

This is one of the more annoying problems.  I have found no way to 
combat this other than to make the offending line its own separate 
paragraph and change the margins just for that paragraph.

Problem 3:	Can you gloss text with furigana in Word 98?

Yes, you can do furigana, but it is insanely complicated.  For those 
of you with a lot of patience, here goes.  I'll try to make this as 
simple as possible, but bear with me.

You have to use a field code that creates an equation.  I discovered 
this equation by bringing a document that had been created on 
Japanese Word 98 and bringing it over to the English version on my 
computer.  To my surprise, the furigana came through.  I could find 
no dialog box in Word that would allow me to do this easily, so I 
began playing around with it.  You're going to need to use this 
equation every time you do furigana, but to type it in every time is 
crazy.  So before you even know what the hell it is, you're going to 
create an autocorrect keyboard shortcut to create a simpler means of 
producing the equation.

First, in a blank document, choose Insert-->Fields?.  In the long 
horizontal box in the middle of the dialog box type the following. 
(get rid of the equal sign [=] that is already there).  Also, for 
purposes of clarity, the underline marks [_] below should be regular 
spaces.

eq_\o\ac(\s\up_12(),)

Click OK, and it should bring you back to your original document.  If 
it says "error!" you made a mistake-delete everything and try again. 
If you didn't make a mistake, it will look like nothing is there. 
But if you press the left arrow key slowly a few times you will see 
that something there turns gray.  Keep it there and while holding the 
control key down, click on it to bring up a contextual menu box. 
Select "Toggle Field Codes" and then you should see the equation you 
just wrote in between thick black brackets.

Now to have Word produce this equation automatically: Push the right 
arrow key to un-gray it, and then while holding the shift key, push 
the left arrow key.  This time, as with any text, it's not gray, but 
black.  Then choose copy from the edit menu.  Under the tools menu, 
choose AutoCorrect.  In the With box should be your equation.  In the 
Replace box, you're going to want to choose a word to bring up the 
equation automatically.  I chose "rubi" but if you have a friend by 
that name, you might want to choose something else, like "furi." 
Don't choose an English word or even a Romaji word that you may use 
in your writing.  Then press OK, and go back to a blank document. 
Type in "rubi" or whatever your trigger was and push the space 
bar--it will change, but be hidden again.  So push the left arrow to 
turn it gray, and then click on it with the control key depressed to 
toggle the field codes.  You should see this:

{eq \o\ac(\s\up 12(),)}

OK.  Now it's time for the Japanese

{eq \o\ac(\s\up 12(*),@)}

Where the @ is, you put your original word in Kanji, 12 point.  Where 
the * is you put your furigana, 6 point.  The 12 in the equation 
means how close the furigana is to the regular text.  11 makes it 
closer to the text, 13 brings it even farther away.  Once you've put 
the Japanese in, toggle the field codes and you should have a word 
with furigana!!

A few notes:
If you are typing Japanese text that extends beyond one line, any 
text after this equation will be pushed on to it's own line.  I have 
found no way to overcome this except by manually putting in English 
spaces at the end of the line.  I tried that nonbreaking space thing 
that I outlined above, but it just messed up the equation.

Once you've gotten the text the way you want it, you can make it so 
that the amount of space in between the lines with furigana is the 
same as the amount of space lines that do not contain furigana by 
going into Format-->Paragraph and changing the Line Spacing to 
EXACTLY 18 pt. or 24 pt. or somewhere in between those two values.

I hope this helps more than it hurts.  Good luck.

I addition, on a more editoral note, maybe someone out there who has 
befriended a tech support person at Microsoft can get the name of the 
person in charge of Japanese language-related issues to whom we might 
start a letter-writing campaign or something.  It's pathetic that we 
should have to deal with this sort of stuff.  Former language-saavy 
word processing programs enabled us to accomplish all of the tasks 
that I've outlined above from the very beginning.  I truly hope that 
for the next version or update of Word, someone is listening to us.
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