Re: [pagination] Draft pagination document now in GitHub and online

On Sun, 2013-10-27 at 09:05 +0100, Ivan Herman wrote:

> I must admit I am uneasy about putting anything out of scope at this
> moment. For example, call me naïve, but my hope is that, aside from
> terminology, Arabic, Hebrew, and other rtl writing systems may not be
> all that different apart from a carefully chosen terminology. 

They aren't, although the definition of a baseline has to be made
carefully, maths (even simple numbers) need special handling, and of
course whitespace is treated very differently with the Arabic script. So
there are a lot of details to consider. Typography is about attention to
detail.

RenderX, as I understand it, is quite widely used for formatting (using
XSL-FO with of course embedded CSS properties) of Arabic and Chinese,
and mixed Arabic, Chinese and English such as you might find in
Malaysia. I remember a question to the XSL-FO WG at one point about
where to put the underline on a right-to-left quotation embedded in
vertical text. There's also stuff in XSL-FO for mixing e.g. Hindi and
Arabic. So there's expertise floating around not too far away, and
documents for Arabic and Hebrew typesetting would share a lot with those
for Latin script Western languages, kashida and cantillation
notwithstanding :)

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

Received on Sunday, 27 October 2013 20:37:46 UTC