Re: [css3-text] text-emphasis marks in Tibetan

fantasai wrote:

> I have two Tibetan books here (ISBN 7-105-03459-9 and ISBN 7-105-0004-2)
> that use emphasis marks. They are placed below each "word" (where "word"
> is the linguistic unit separated by tsek marks).

> The two symbols I see are the filled circle and a little handwritten-style
> "x".

Was there a question regarding these?

The filling of the circle may be an artefact of writing. An open circle 
Tibetan emphasis mark is encoded in Unicode as U+0F37. There is also 
U+0F35, an honorific emphasis mark, and assorted other below-base 
symbols in the Unicode Tibetan block. It may be that the x you see in 
the books is a variant of one or other of these (a spacing x mark is one 
of the Tibetan astrological signs).

I presume you are wondering about how these marks are to be positioned 
relative to words rather than relative to base characters or grapheme 
clusters within words. I had the same question years ago regarding the 
Hebrew masoretic circle (U+05AF), which is positioned over the centre of 
a word. The answer in that case was that it was up to the author to 
insert the combining mark character in an appropriate place in the 
middle of the word, and because the mark might need to interact 
typographically with other above marks, e.g. be contextually offset 
left/right or even raised to avoid collision, one really didn't want to 
remove the mark from the glyph string and try to position is separately 
relative to the whole word.

If the Tibetan emphasis marks to which you refer are in Unicode, and if 
they are encoded as combining marks, then I suspect the same would be 
true for them.

JH

Received on Tuesday, 23 November 2010 15:10:55 UTC