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My aim is to put tone marks above Chinese characters in latex. I have tried \v{好}, but this puts the carron accent (3rd tone) in the space left of the character rather than above it.

I have also found that $\stackrel{\vee}{\textrm{你}}$ works well but cannot find equivelent symbols for the other tones. I have tried --, \diagup and \diagdown, but they look really out of place

The standard unicode symbols for the tones are 02C9, 02CA, 02C7, 02CB and 02D9, but think that these are the same as using \v ect.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Thank-you. The purpose of this is to have them automatically generated to help people learning chinese. I've written the software for that, so just need to output it in a nice format.

P.S. To use Chinese characters in Latex

\documentclass[12p]{article}
\usepackage{CJKutf8}

\begin{document}
\begin{CJK*}{UTF8}{gbsn}
你
\end{CJK*}
\end{document}
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Just for reference: This question is duplicated from Stack Overflow. – Paŭlo Ebermann Aug 13 '11 at 13:27
yep, I put a link to it in the answer – Twig Aug 15 '11 at 17:51

2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

I am pretty sure that the symbols are not the same ones as the \v etc. Have you tried just typing those symbols in text? I've never used CJKutf8, but I did use CJK with Big5 encoding, and was able to type even in Ruby/ZhuYin symbols.

What I did was to 

\newcommand{\rubychinese}[2]{\begin{tabular*}{3em}{c} {\Large #1} \\ %
   {\tiny #2}\end{tabular*}}

which I used like

\rubychinese{<character goes here>}{<pronunciation guide goes here>}

(In my version the ZhuYin appears below the main word, but you can easily switch the order.) Since there is a Bopomofo block in unicode, perhaps you just need a font supporting it and an input method that allows you to type those symbols?

An example output:

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Thank-you that looks most helpful, can you paste the symbols used for the tones from zhuyin, as we usually use pinyin and they are attached to the letters. – Twig Oct 23 '10 at 12:33
2  
The marks look more or less the same... bad news though, I just checked the unicode tables, and for the tone marks one is referred to the Pinyin tone marks. (See Chapter 10 of the unicode book.) Which is a shame, as in Big5 those marks are the same size as the normal characters (similar to how there's a full-size \prime in LaTeX). So you may need to play a bit with fonts/scaling/boxes to get the output right. You may also want to google the phrase "latex ruby characters", 'ruby' being the technical term for these kind of pronunciation guides attached to ideographs. – Willie Wong Oct 23 '10 at 14:11
up vote 5 down vote

I have found a solution for this

$\stackrel{\textrm{\raisebox{-0.5em}[0.25em][-0em]{\={}}}}{\textrm{你}}$
$\stackrel{\textrm{\raisebox{-0.5em}[0.25em][-0em]{\'{}}}}{\textrm{你}}$
$\stackrel{\textrm{\raisebox{-0.5em}[0.25em][-0em]{\v{}}}}{\textrm{你}}$
$\stackrel{\textrm{\raisebox{-0.5em}[0.25em][-0em]{\`{}}}}{\textrm{你}}$
$\stackrel{\textrm{\raisebox{-0.5em}[0.25em][-0em]{\.{}}}}{\textrm{你}}$

for tones 1→4 with a dot above the 5th.

(I mainly updated the question on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4003524/latex-question-accents-on-characters)

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