LyX ⇒ How can I make Japanese text generally smaller?

[Umin]

Hello members,

I'm currently using LyX to write my thesis which includes a few Japanese words and expressions next to German. Everything works well; I'm using XeTeX to process the file and can use my usual Japanese font for the Japanese text.
However, there's one thing that still bothers me: Japanese characters tend to be a bit higher than the Latin script and that makes them stand out in the text when they're next to Latin Script.

Is there something I can put into the preamble that makes the Japanese text automatically one size smaller than the other text so it fits in better?

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi Umin,

welcome to the board!

How do you write Japanese text? Which font are you using? Perhaps you could post an example .lyx file as attachment here. I don't know if there are many Japanese writing users here, perhaps also somebody else could help if there would be sufficient information to reproduce the problem. At least I would know how do achieve the desired behavior with some fonts, just never tried Japanese.

Stefan

[Umin]

I use Hiragino Mincho ProN (standard Japanese font on the Mac). The only font I know so far where the Japanese has the same size/height as the Western text is Bitstream Cyberbit, but it doesn't look as good and I think my professor would complain if I were to use it in my work.

I don't really want to post a whole document here, but I've attached a file with an example that makes visible what I mean (I hope). In the upper text, I just wrote everything down, in the lower one I manually changed all the Japanese characters to a smaller size than the Latin script. As doing this by hand is pretty tedious, it'd be really nice if somebody could help me.

This is what the PDF output of the attached file looks like for me (as other fonts might be different)

LyX-Japanese.png (49.52 KiB) Viewed 2599 times

Of course, if anybody knows a good-looking Minchô-font that just is a smaller size, I'd be glad as well.