The asian phonetic guide is a useful feature when learning an asian language. Last week I worked on writing it in the docx files. The feature is now happily sitting in the docx-fixes02.diff patch in the go-oo git repository. Here are some screenshots of the feature in Word and OpenOffice.org for those eager to see what it is.

Phonetic guide in OOo

Phonetic guide reopened in word

The phonetic guide configuration options in OpenOffice.org and Word aren't the same. What is working here is the export of the text with it's usual properties and the alignement of the pronounciation. Note that the characters on the above sample are grouped in the OOo dialog, but not when opening Word's dialog: this comes from the different color setting applied to one of the characters.

When testing this code, I also discovered a strange compatibility issue between Word 97 and Word 2007 when opening the .doc version of the file:

• For Word 97, the field for the ruby text in the doc file needs to be { EQ \* jc0 \* "Font:Arial" \* hps12 \o(\s\up 10(kong3zi); 孔子 ) }*
• For Word 2007, the field for the ruby text in the doc file needs to be { EQ \* jc0 \* "Font:Arial" \* hps12 \o(\s\up 10(kong3zi), 孔子 ) }*

Then when saving a file with a phonetic guide in Word 97 and opening it in Word 2007, all the fields need to be changed to have commas as function parameters separator (instead of semi-colon).