Asiatic phonetic guide, feature request

[BenEngbers]

I use LO writer 7.5.6.2 in linux/Fedora.

For adding furigana to kanji, I use the asiatic phonetic guide a lot in Libre Office Writer.
When I select the word 大変 (taihen) in LO writer and I add furigana in the phonetic guide, I get the following in LO writer:

The 4 hiragana kana are shown above the pair of Kanji. All words consisting of multiple kanji are displayed in the same way.
What I would prefer to see is the following where you can clearly see which kana belong to which kanji:

In the UI, the 2 kanji are shown on 1 line in the Base text box:

I would prefer that they are shown on 2 separate lines.

In this file I have used both methods.
furigana 2.odt (10.8 KB)

Can I already achieve this goal in the existing guide by changing a setting? If not, is it possible to add this as a feature?

Ben

[ajlittoz]

Since most of us are not Japanese literate, please attach a sample file with the two kanji glyphs and the corresponding furigana. Do this by editing your question. Don’t use a comment.

[LeroyG]

I believe to have understood: The request is not about the resulting display of glyphs in the document, but in the Asian Phonetic Guide dialog.
You can create an enhancement request.
As a workaround, you can select each kanji by turns, and set the appropiate furigana, and the Preview field will show them in two lines.

[ajlittoz]

From experiment, I think the problem comes from the definition of what is considered a “word”. A “word” is a string of characters between spaces or punctuations. This works fine with Western alphabet-based languages but no longer fits a specific application like furigana which is supposed (as I understand it) to annotate each kanji separately.

The workaround I found is to temporarily insert spaces between kanji (I don’t know if I can “pluralise” the term). When you select the kanji sequence and Format>Asian Phonetic Guide, every kanji is now in its separate Base text box. Apparently, you are not limited to four kanji(s?) because a scroll bar appears when this number is exceeded.

Remove the spaces between the kanji if they are incorrect in Japanese layout.

Is this removal worse than having to select the kanji one by one instead?

PS: submitting an enhancement request is probably a good idea but clearly explain that the problem is in the UI, not in the formatting.

[BenEngbers]

To further complicate matters, to my knowledge, a Japanese word consists of one or more Kanji. The meaning of that word can be further specified by adding a hiragana-kana to it.
I had also thought of the workaround of inserting spaces but that causes problems when trying to translate the text with Google translate.
I would prefer that in the UI a key combination be used to switch between the current default view - where all hiragana are listed together - or the alternative view where the different kanji are each shown in their own Base text box.