Re: Ruby: questions about fallback

On 2013/03/07 2:17, John Cowan wrote:
> Phillips, Addison scripsit:
>
>> I can't speak to the expectation of Chinese users for ruby fallback,
>> but from recent experience, I do know that compound nouns in Chinese
>> are not uncommon, even if your surmise about them being less common
>> than in Japanese is correct. Having ruby appear parenthetically between
>> each subword might look odd, even though the ruby (when drawn as ruby)
>> would be placed character-by-character.
>
> Indeed, the great bulk of all Chinese nouns are compound, if by that is
> meant "written with two or more hanzi".

Yes. There isn't that much difference between Japanese and Chinese when 
it comes to compounds of Hanzi/Kanji. After all, Kanji came from China, 
and with them, the methods of combining them and many already existing 
compounds.

One thing that's different is that many Chinese use the words "word" and 
"character" almost interchangeably. I.e. they may be a lot less aware of 
the fact that there are compound words.

I'm not sure how this may affect ruby formatting. One guess would be 
that because bopomofo is rendered right to each Hanzi even in horizontal 
rendering, readers might expect to also have fallback per character. But 
that is only a wild guess. For other kinds of ruby, e.g. pinyin, it 
could be different. It could also be different depending on the target 
of the ruby, e.g. for children in school or for adults,...

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Thursday, 7 March 2013 01:42:08 UTC