Re: Ruby: Requirements and prioritization

  董福興 Bobby Tung <bobbytung@wanderer.tw> wrote:
>
> Mr. Murata
>
> I'm Bobby Tung from Wanderer Digital Publishing Inc. in Taiwan.
> Sophie Pang forward this letter to me. If possible, please forward
> to members in mail-list and let me follow the discussion.
>
> I've made a Bopomofo ruby sample as attachment for testing.
>
> Bopomofo is used in education area, usually for pre-school
> and primary school. So It should be displayed accurately
> as print textbook for adoption. Practically, neither browsers
> nor reading system support Bopomofo ruby well. I'll list
> reasons below:
>
> 1, Ruby-position: inter-character
> Bopomofo should be all displayed vertically along the right
> side of the glyph. In vertical writing, it performs well but
> need letter-spacing fine tuned by reading system. In
> horizontal writing, none of browsers support
> ruby-position: inter-character attribution.

I believe an appropriate workaround for this can be

   rt { display: inline; writing-mode: vertical-rl; }

This will turn the annotation into an inline-block with
vertical writing mode, which will place it inline.

However, I suspect ruby layout is currently hard-coded
to the markup in the layout engines that support it, so
this probably only works in theory.

> 2, Tone markings
> Bopomofo has 4 tone marking: ˙ˊˇˋ.
> First one ˙should be positioned top in ruby text area,
> so that's ok in practice. But others should be along
> the right side of ruby text area（二重構造になります）.
> This structure is not in Ruby Module Draft. That
> results Bopomofo display unable to fulfill educational
> requirement, and hard to practice well.

This is not a problem with Ruby, but with the display
of Bopomofo in general. If you are writing in Bopomofo,
even if you are not annotating a character, you will
have the same problem. Therefore this should be solved
by the text rendering system, not by Ruby. We want this
tone mark positioning behavior in all contexts, right?
Not just when Bopomofo is used with Ruby.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

> 3, Ruby-align: center
> Bopomofo usually combines with 1~3 characters.
> And as mentioned in tone markings, one of them
> should be placed in the top. To maximum 4 characters
> for each glyph. In educational usage, all glyph
> should be with their Bopomofo. So as W3C
> draft, when ruby-align: center , narrow-cell
> glyph ruby behavior have to be implied by
> reading system to reach practical level.

I will keep this in mind as we review the CSS Ruby drafts.

> Hope reasons listed above able to let you
> figure out Bopomofo ruby in practice. The
> most critical problem is position of tone
> markings. Once solved, with browsers'
> and reading systems' implement and tool
> to add characters and tone marking to
> every glyph. It will be sufficient to use
> EPUB 3 in language learning in Taiwan.

If I understand the problem correctly, I think this critical
problem needs to be solved outside W3C, as we do not control
the text rendering engines.

~fantasai

Received on Tuesday, 26 February 2013 01:17:19 UTC