Re: [css-ruby] Tone mark of bopomofo in ruby

On Wed, Feb 11, 2015 at 11:44 PM, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org> wrote:
> On 11/02/2015 13:28, Koji Ishii wrote:
>>
>> But I'm still unable to figure out whether the reordering is the right
>> thing to do or not. Bobby and Xidorn say it's not. Word does (thank
>> you Richard again for the investigation and updating the blog[2] as
>> always.) So, is Word doing what Taiwanese do not want? I have to admit
>> that it's quite possible;)  but I consider this question is still not
>> fully resolved yet.
>
>
> hi Koji,
>
> To be clear: Word reorders the position of the light tone by changing the
> character order after you input the whole syllable. It doesn't reorder the
> glyph position using the font.
>
> The order of characters you end up with in zhuying annotations in Word
> matches that found in a number of dictionary implementations. It also
> matches the visual position of the light tone in all vertical text I've
> seen.
>
> From what I've seen so far, therefore, I'm inclined to think that putting
> the light tone mark code point at the start of the syllable has to be
> regarded as a viable, and probably actually the default, practice.
>
> The outstanding question appears to be, rather, whether placing the light
> tone code point after the bopmofo letter code points (usually only found in
> non-ruby instances) is actually a true use case, or whether this is just
> something that happens because people haven't bothered to change the output
> of IMEs.

Hm, but all IMEs doing so indicates me that there were some reasonable
reasons for IMEs to output that order. Do we know why? In which order
does people write by hand? Maybe IMEs follow that?

If IMEs have some reasonable reasons, another question came up in mind
is that, should it be responsible for authoring software, or rendering
software. If it's a feature like AutoCorrect or SmartQuotes, then the
responsibility is on the authoring tools, not on the rendering
engines. Maybe that's the reason why Bobby thinks the rendering
engines should not be bothered?

/koji

Received on Wednesday, 11 February 2015 15:01:17 UTC