Furigana, also known as Ruby or Rubi, is common in Japanese and Chinese. I will speak of Japanese furigana (rubi) because that is what I am most familiar with.
Furigana are small characters which rest on the top (or in vertical writing on the right side) of the standard characters. Furigana are made up of smaller hirigana symbols which explain the pronunciation of the kanji that they are with. They are useful in many texts, ranging from textbooks and teaching guides to regular novels and novella. They may also be used as a way to explain the pronunciation of someone's name, as there are many possible pronunciations of kanji available.
Though they are widely used in Japanese typesetting, I have yet to find a program that has this function, at least on a Mac. It seems to be a good ability for Mellel to display, not only to set itself apart from the other word processors, but to be closer to its goal of true multi-lingual support.
Feature Request: Furigana
Moderators: Eyal Redler, redlers, Ori Redler
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nicka
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I'm strongly in favour, both because this is essential for true East Asian text support and because basically the same feature is needed for interlinear glosses, needed by linguists, among others. These are key consituencies for an avowedly multilingual, academic word-processor.
Mellel would be ahead of the competition in implementing these features. There's a format for ruby text in HTML but it is not displayed properly by browsers. There are add-ons for making LaTeX do interlinear glosses, such as cgloss4e.sty; no word-processor handles this well at present, as far as I know.
I think the key to this feature is the ability to set two or more adjacent lines so that the beginnings of (some, specified) words are aligned. Compare the examples at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_characters and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloss#In_linguistics. In comparison with this fundamental point, the relative sizes of the characters, and whether the gloss is before or after the sentence it glosses are only details.
So linguists and others who want interlinear glosses should vote for this feature too.
Two points to add to the orignal post's description:
1) furigana can also be katakana, not just hiragana. In Japanese texts, roman letters, arabic numerals or Chinese characters can be used in the same way. All are a kind of interlinear gloss, with the special features that the gloss comes before the main text (ie above right to left text or to the right of vertical text) and the gloss characters are generally smaller than the ones in the main text.
2) as jlennon says, similar glosses can be used in other scripts, particularly East Asian ones. For example, Mandarin Chinese is often written in Taiwan with a pronunciation gloss in the chu-yin script.
Mellel would be ahead of the competition in implementing these features. There's a format for ruby text in HTML but it is not displayed properly by browsers. There are add-ons for making LaTeX do interlinear glosses, such as cgloss4e.sty; no word-processor handles this well at present, as far as I know.
I think the key to this feature is the ability to set two or more adjacent lines so that the beginnings of (some, specified) words are aligned. Compare the examples at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_characters and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloss#In_linguistics. In comparison with this fundamental point, the relative sizes of the characters, and whether the gloss is before or after the sentence it glosses are only details.
So linguists and others who want interlinear glosses should vote for this feature too.
Two points to add to the orignal post's description:
1) furigana can also be katakana, not just hiragana. In Japanese texts, roman letters, arabic numerals or Chinese characters can be used in the same way. All are a kind of interlinear gloss, with the special features that the gloss comes before the main text (ie above right to left text or to the right of vertical text) and the gloss characters are generally smaller than the ones in the main text.
2) as jlennon says, similar glosses can be used in other scripts, particularly East Asian ones. For example, Mandarin Chinese is often written in Taiwan with a pronunciation gloss in the chu-yin script.
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nicka
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Those who can't wait for ruby text in Mellel can try LightWayText, which does ruby characters on both vertical and horizontal text. The same software company makes the free iTextExpress which can't do ruby, but does do vertical text nicely, automatically using vertical alternates in Japanese text.
