- From: Xidorn Quan <quanxunzhen@gmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2015 09:30:43 +1100
- To: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>
- Cc: Koji Ishii <kojiishi@gmail.com>, Bobby Tung <bobbytung@wanderer.tw>, www-style list <www-style@w3.org>, CJK discussion <public-i18n-cjk@w3.org>
- Message-ID: <CAMdq69-jihW5ZDGmBCM=BV-mJX1jYbQOqN4hi2Eda4s25EjFSg@mail.gmail.com>
On Sat, Jan 31, 2015 at 4:43 AM, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org> wrote: > On 29/01/2015 23:30, Xidorn Quan wrote: > >> On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 4:47 AM, Koji Ishii <kojiishi@gmail.com >> <mailto:kojiishi@gmail.com>> wrote: >> >> After reading Richard's new blog post[1], especially its Questions >> section[2], and with some conversation with him, I'm started to be >> convinced that doing this in inter-character might make more sense. >> Doing it in fonts still look good if it works, but if Richard's >> analysis is right about it can't be done with existing features, >> adding an OpenType feature for Bopomofo might be harder. >> >> >> I'm still not convinced. I don't see any analysis in this article about >> why positioning tone mark cannot be done by font with existing features. >> From the question "Can tone positioning be done using font metrics?", if >> I read correctly, he pointed out three difficulties: >> >> (1) There are too many characters in Chinese font, which makes it hard >> to mark every character with annotation. >> (2) There are fonts with annotation marked, but they are suffered from >> heteronyms. >> (3) Reordering of code points is usually done by layout engine instead >> of fonts. >> >> Please tell me if I missed something important. >> >> The first two points don't make sense to me. We don't hope characters to >> be marked with the whole annotation. We simply hope fonts have special >> values for positioning tone marks to be besides bopomofo. There are only >> less than 40 bopomofo characters, and 4 tone marks. Hence there are no >> more than 160 combinations (even less, because the 20+ consonants won't >> be combined with tone marks, and light tone is not combined besides >> bopomofo, hence actually only about 50). I'm not familiar with OpenType >> features, hence I don't know if it is feasible to handle this with >> features like GPOS (I suspect it is), but it doesn't seem to be harder >> than positioning requirements of scripts like Arabic. In addition, given >> the small number of combinations, I guess it could at least be handled >> with GSUB. >> > > Thanks for this comment. I think you may be right. I had been coming at > the problem after thinking of the fonts out there that encode the actual > bopomofo needed for each character within the font. But I think you're > right that that's not what we need here. > > The bopomofo to be associated with a character is spelled out by the ruby > markup. I guess all that's needed is a way to render the tone marks in > relation to the bopomofo characters. > > In that case, actually, I suppose it would even be possible, as a stop > gap, to speed up the process of adoption by creating small fonts that just > do bopomofo and using font-family to apply those to the ruby annotations. > Such fonts may be relatively easy to produce and distribute, and especially > if they are free to use they could therefore allow people to start using > bopomofo ruby sooner rather than later. Yes, that's a great idea. And I guess it is also possible to develop a tool which extracts bopomofo characters and tone marks from a font, and generates the required bopomofo font automatically, so that authors can make their pages look more consistent? - Xidorn
Received on Friday, 30 January 2015 22:31:55 UTC