Re: [css3-text] text-transform: han-numerals

On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 10:00 AM, fantasai
<fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:
> [Adding back www-style]
> On 10/26/2010 06:28 AM, MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given) wrote:
>> How do Japanese represent numbers using han-ideographic characters?
>> There are more than one way to represent numbers.
>>
>> For example, 35 can be represented by
>>
>> 三五,
>> 三十五,
>> 参五, or
>> 参拾五
>>
>> 305 can be represented by
>>
>> 三〇五,
>> 三百五,
>> 参百五, or
>> 参〇五
>>
>> and 10035 can be represented by
>>
>> 一万三十五,
>> 壱萬参拾五,
>> 壱〇〇参五,
>> 一〇〇三五, or
>> １万３５
>>
>> I do not believe that we can provide automatic conversion from numbers
>> to han-ideographic representations.
>
> It's true that there are many ways to represent numbers in Han characters.
> It's also true that there are many ways to represent numbers in the Latin
> script. I can write
>
> 1,000,000
> 1 million
> one million
> etc.
>
> But, as with the various Han representations, only one of those is in a
> decimal system: the others are mixtures of digits and words. We can
> transform decimal to decimal easily. And I think this is adequate for
> hitting the 80% use case.
>
> For anyone who wants to do something more complicated, then more markup
> support is needed. But even then, HTML+CSS can do it:
>
>  <abbr class="number" title="三十五">35</abbr>
>
> vertical.css:
>  abbr.number { content: attr(title) }
>
> So I don't really see this issue as a problem. Also, I think it is not
> a showstopper if numbers cannot be converted from the preferred form
> for vertical to the preferred form for horizontal: it might not adhere
> to the full force of typographic tradition, but using decimal digits
> in vertical is neither wrong nor uncommon.

This could be solved, for example, by co-opting the @counter-style
declarations I'll be introducing in the Lists module.  They're
basically just a declarative mapping from numbers to representations.

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 26 October 2010 19:52:03 UTC