Re: [css3-text] line break opportunities are based on *syllable* boundaries?

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 01:45:51PM -0500, Koji Ishii wrote:
> There was a feedback to a paragraph in CSS3 Text, 5. Line Breaking
> and Word Boundaries[1] in Japan:
> 
> > In several other writing systems, (including Chinese,
> > Japanese, Yi, and sometimes also Korean) a line break
> > opportunities are based on *syllable* boundaries, not words.
> 
> In Chinese, Yi, and Hangul, a character represents a syllable as far
> as I understand, but in Japanese, Kanji characters could have more
> than one syllable, and also there are cases where multiple characters
> represent single syllable (like Kana + prolonged sound mark).

(One could question the correspondence even for Chinese.)

> Although this part is not normative, it looks like we should replace
> "syllable" with "grapheme cluster".
> 
> Please let me know if this change can be incorrect to any other
> writing systems listed here than Japanese.
> 
> [1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-text/#line-breaking

The "syllable" wording might have been chosen in reference to rules
concerning punctuation and ruby annotations and the like.

I see that the current text requests references for line breaking;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_breaking_rules_in_East_Asian_language
has some references, including references for Korean.  Some of the
pages that it references (including the corresponding Japanese and
Korean wikipedia pages on which the English page was based) may have
additional information.

pjrm.

Received on Friday, 28 January 2011 03:31:54 UTC