- From: Ambrose LI <ambrose.li@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2013 23:53:30 -0500
- To: John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>
- Cc: www-style@w3.org, "'WWW International' (www-international@w3.org)" <www-international@w3.org>, "CJK discussion (public-i18n-cjk@w3.org)" <public-i18n-cjk@w3.org>, public-i18n-bidi@w3.org
2013/2/4 John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com>: > Here again, the right answer is to use an italic face. For upright > ideographic characters I'm mystified why someone would consider #6 > to be correct, the rendering of basic ideographic characters shouldn't > vary whether it's included in horizontal or vertical runs. The Webkit > rendering (#8) seems like the better choice. Totally agreed, but I guess one has to be reminded of the context here: That in both Chinese and Japanese (perhaps Korean too, but I can’t read Korean) the word “italics” has been mistranslated as “slanted type,” and this mistranslation is so ingrained that so NO ONE (not even professional graphic designers) would think of “an italic face” when we mention “italics” in a CJK context. Personally speaking, I’d say a style that corresponds to the correct definition of “italics” does exist in CJK typography (see my blog if you’re interested), but the direction of the slant doesn’t match that of Latin italics (whether we are talking about horizontal or vertical writing). So #8 will feel wrong because the direction of the slant is wrong (especially when writing vertically). And add to that the fact that we don’t use that style the way we use italics in Latin text. So #6 is obviously wrong, but since #8 is wrong too but harmonizes with the Latin, I can see why *someone* might prefer #6 =P (After all, the reason, as far as I know, for Chinese having been turned into a horizontal LTR script was to harmonize with Latin text…) -- cheers, -ambrose <http://gniw.ca/>
Received on Tuesday, 5 February 2013 04:54:01 UTC