RE: HANGUL JONGSEONG, vertical text flow, and Unicode East Asian Width

Hello,

Although I already told this to Koji in person, I'm sending this email for KIG members to encourage further discussion or comments.

In my understanding, the codes for CHOSEONG, JUNGSEONG, and JONGSEONG are for conjoining to form a letter so that they are not used to display by themselves. Each Jamo (Korean alphabets - each consonant or vowel) can be displayed by using other code categorized as LETTER. For example, there is a LETTER A for displaying JUNGSEONG A.

161; N # HANGUL JUNGSEONG A
314F;W # HANGUL LETTER A

Since LETTERs are W(ide), I think this issue is not a problem anymore to display JUNGSEONG(vowel) itself in vertical mode. However, I'm not an expert in this area, any comment from KIG members will be welcomed.

Regards,
Soonbo Han

-----Original Message-----
From: 
Sent: 없음
To: Koji Ishii
Cc: public-html-ig-ko@w3.org; public-i18n-cjk@w3.org
Subject: Re: HANGUL JONGSEONG, vertical text flow, and Unicode East Asian Width

On 3/9/2011 3:09 PM, Koji Ishii wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Will you mind to help me to resolve a question in CSS3 Writing Modes spec?
>
> I'm trying to figure out which characters are displayed upright and which are rotated sideways in vertical text flow. I understand vertical text flow isn't very important for Hangul, but I hope you understand I want to write the correct spec in case you need it.
>
> Current idea is written in the spec[1], paragraphs after Figure 10. The basic idea is to use a combination of font information, Unicode Script Property[2], and Unicode East Asian Width[3].
>
> EAW (Unicode East Asian Width) defines character orientation like this in its Recommendation section[4]:
> * Wide characters ... are not rotated (and therefore rendered upright) when appearing in vertical text runs.
> * Narrow characters ... are rotated sideways, when appearing in vertical text.
>
> If I look into the data file[5], most Hangul characters are W(ide), so they are rendered upright in vertical text flow according to the Unicode definitions. I suppose this is what you expect.
>
> However, many of HANGUL JONGSEONG are marked as N and therefore they must be rotated sideways in vertical text flow if we follow this rule.
>
> 115F;W # HANGUL CHOSEONG FILLER
> 1160;N # HANGUL JUNGSEONG FILLER
> 1161;N # HANGUL JUNGSEONG A
> 1162;N # HANGUL JUNGSEONG AE
> 1163;N # HANGUL JUNGSEONG YA
> ...
>
> I'm guessing this is NOT what you expect. Can anyone in this ML help me to resolve this situation? Possible answers I'm guessing are:
>


The characters in question are conjoining Jamos. They are supposed to 
form into syllables, which themselves are rendered upright in vertical 
writing.

The question is whether anyone ever renders these things as themselves, 
that is when not combined into syllables and whether in that case they 
are upright when (if ever) they are vertical.

Whatever the outcome, option 2 seems least desirable, because of the way 
EAW is defined.


> 1. Unicode EAW is correct; these code points should be rotated sideways in vertical text flow.
> 2. Unicode EAW is incorrect; these code points should be "W", not "N".
> 3. There are reasons to make these code points as "N", so EAW is correct, but "Narrow are rotated sideways" is incorrect.
>
> Which one is it, or anything else? I asked this to Soonbo Han from LG at CSSWG, he thinks the answer is not 1, but he wasn't sure if it's 2 or 3 or else.
>
> Your support is greatly appreciated.
>
>
> Regards,
> Koji
>
> [1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-writing-modes/#text-orientation
> [2] http://unicode.org/reports/tr24/
> [3] http://unicode.org/reports/tr11/
> [4] http://unicode.org/reports/tr11/#Recommendations
> [5] http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/EastAsianWidth.txt
>
>

Received on Thursday, 10 March 2011 01:29:13 UTC