RE: Korean-specific CSS issues to be discussed

 
> >> 1. CSS vertical
> >> Actually it has disappeared the Korean vertical typesetting since
> >> 1999. Now there are only type setting from left to right in Korea. So
> >> I think Korea is exceptional case from CJK.
> >
> > Just from curiosity. When you want to publish old books written in vertical flow in EPUB,
> are you going to publish them in horizontal flow?
> 
> For archival purposes it would make very little sense to change the original flow of the
> publication.

The situation must be different for Korea but just for your information; Japanese used right-to-left horizontal for a few decades in the history and there are commercial publishing using that layout. Some argued the flow should be changed to left-to-right for easier reading, while few argued this should be supported in HTML. Another idea is to use scanned image with text annotation for search and accessibility purposes just like Google Books does.

We have published books by replacing old characters with new ones because old characters are hard to read for most people. If they were supposed to be read by wide range of people, it's probably better to change, but if they were for archiving, it's probably better to keep original layout as you said.

I agree that it's not an easy question and Japanese too have not reached to a conclusion yet.


> On the other hand, documents that have significant archival value do require more than
> just vertical notation - for one example to replicate the exact transcript of [1][2]
> Hunminjeongeum Eonhaebon, I would suspect that additional notes might be needed in the
> specification for this particular use case, as per the Ruby Annotation spec there are only
> two places to position ruby text in a vertical context - left and right.
> 
> Not being a historian (nor a linguist) myself, I'm unable to say much about the actual value
> of such a use case though apart from that it would be "nice to have".
> 
> [1] http://net.segye.com/9932
> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum
> [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/jlreq/

This is interesting to me. Could you mind to tell me what these dots on left of characters mean? Are they to help reading just like Ruby Annotation, or are they formatting staff like emphasis marks[1]? It looks like emphasis marks to me, but I see you use both single dot and double dots, which might mean different things.

[1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-text/#emphasis-marks


Regards,
Koji

Received on Tuesday, 25 January 2011 01:57:14 UTC