RE: [css3-text] emphasis dots used with ruby

I met with a group of people working at Manga division in a Japanese publisher today, and they supported what you said.

Here's a short summary of findings:
* Emphasis marks are often used in Manga.
* Manga for children use ruby on every ideographic character, so "the emphasis marks over ruby-ed text" is pretty common.
* I asked what if the system doesn't support "the emphasis marks over ruby-ed text". They said they would choose the emphasis marks and give up ruby for the text.

So, for Manga, it looks like the item 2 of your proposal:
> 2. Specify the "emphasis dots overriding ruby" behavior.
> But this won't be forward-compatible for manga use cases,
> which might be implemented in SVG+CSS in the future.
must be the way to go, although I didn't understand what you meant by the 2nd sentence starting "but this won't be...". What do you mean by "forward-compatible"?

If I'm not mistaken, I remember JLTF confirmed that they'd prefer ruby over emphasis marks, but today's meeting resulted opposite. I'll check this with JLTF and some other publishers.


-----Original Message-----
From: Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu [mailto:kennyluck@w3.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2010 9:38 AM
To: Koji Ishii
Cc: WWW Style; CJK discussion; Dennis Chung-Yang Huang
Subject: Re: [css3-text] emphasis dots used with ruby

Since the patch for the 'text-emphasis' property just got landed in Webkit nightly last Friday, I decided to revisit this as soon as possible. (Although I have to admit that this is not such a big issue)

On 2010/11/29, at 14:06, Koji Ishii wrote:

> I agree that such case does exist, but I think this is as much 
> complicated as putting two rubies over the same text. It's possible, 
> but it's more of a graphical representation rather than a regular 
> typography. It would require human to adjust line height, ruby offset, 
> and emphasis marks offset carefully.
>
> Since emphasis mark offset is not currently in the scope of text level 
> 3, I think we can say this case is for future extensions if desired.
>
> I can say that the UA may choose appropriate method to layout emphasis 
> marks over the rubied text, but I think it's pretty difficult for the 
> UA to figure it out anyway.

I agreed with everything what you said above, so I think we should remove the part that says ruby overrides emphasis dots. See the following.

>
> The current draft says
>
> [[
> The marks are drawn once for each grapheme cluster. However, emphasis 
> marks are not drawn for a grapheme cluster consisting of:
>
> - Characters for which ruby is drawn in the same position as the 
> emphasis mark.
> - [snip]
> ]]
>
> But I bumpep into the following dialog in a manga episode: 
> http://goo.gl/photos/IESeVRnMMw
>
> I am not a native Japanese but I have the feeling that, according to 
> the current text in the spec, if you put emphasis dots on a run of 
> text with some text rubied, ruby texts without emphasis dots 
> surrounded by normal texts with emphasis dots will look bad. Perhaps 
> Japanese Layout Task Force can provide some input and clarification?

A picture is worth a thousand words. See the screenshot in http://www.w3.org/People/kennyluck/Test/ruby-and-dots
  . I think what's specced currently is the worst behavior, but maybe you have different opinions. Let me summarize some options:

1. Leave the interaction between ruby and emphasis dots unspecified.

We can either,

1.1 Remove the line that says ruby should override emphasis dots and add a note saying something like "The interaction between ruby and emphasis dots is unspecified in this specification".

1.2 Just remove that line


2. Specify the "emphasis dots overriding ruby" behavior. But this won't be forward-compatible for manga use cases, which might be implemented in SVG+CSS in the future.

3. Do nothing. (Keep the "ruby overriding emphasis dots" behavior).  
This won't be forward-compatible either.


My preference is 1.1 > 1.2 > 2 > 3.

Also notice that Webkit doesn't implement

[[
/* disable inheritance of text-emphasis marks to ruby text:emphasis marks should only apply to base text */ rt { text-emphasis: none; } ]]

yet, but this should be kept as a minimal requirement for the interplay between emphasis dots and ruby.

Received on Friday, 24 December 2010 19:44:50 UTC