RE: [CSS3 Text] Tibetan justification

Note that I'll be travelling to Bhutan later this month.  I'll try to bring back some samples of text.  Should I look for anything in particular?

RI

============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
 
http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-style-request@w3.org 
> [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of fantasai
> Sent: 09 January 2007 11:15
> To: c.fynn@btopenworld.com
> Cc: www-style@w3.org; asmus@unicode.org; Mark Davis; 'WWW 
> International'
> Subject: Re: [CSS3 Text] Tibetan justification
> 
> 
> C J Fynn wrote:
> > 
> > Hi
> > 
> > The working draft of the CSS3 Text Module 
> > 
> <http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/specs/css3-text/scratchp
ad> says:
> > 
> > "tibetan
> >     Justification primarily stretches spaces after shad if the line 
> > contains any and/or pads the end of the line with tsek marks if the 
> > line already ends in one."
> > 
> > 1. "spaces after shad" needs to include spaces following 
> the letters 
> > KA
> > U+0F40 and GA U+0F42 (with or without combining vowels) 
> since the shad
> > is not written after these two characters (due to the long 
> descenders 
> > on the right side of their glyphs).
> 
> Thanks for pointing that out, I'd forgotten to include that exception.
> 
> > 2. Traditionally manuscript and xylograph printed Tibetan 
> texts were 
> > "justified" by padding lines with multiple tsek (U+0F0B) 
> marks. This 
> > was necessary as calculating the amount of extra space needed for 
> > padding lines was impractical when writing text by hand or 
> carving woodblocks.
> > 
> > Today this practice is insisted on by one or two pedantic 
> westerners 
> > who have seen it in old texts and think therefore it should 
> be maintained.
> 
> Ok. I've seen this in a good handful of newly-printed books 
> as well as a Tibetan newspaper in the National Library of 
> China, so whether or not it's the fault of a couple pendantic 
> westerners, it is still in use. However, you are not the only 
> one who sent in a comment suggesting that the value be 
> dropped. After talking with Paul Nelson, we've decided to 
> publish the next official draft of CSS3 Text with the value 
> defined, but note that it will most likely be dropped in the 
> next revision. If there are no objections to that, we'll remove it.
> 
> > However in my experience native Tibetan and Bhutanese users 
> invariably 
> > prefer normally justified text when setting Tibetan on computers. 
> > Since space characters are infrequent in Tibetan (and 
> sometimes do not 
> > occur even in a long line of text) this is best achieved by both 
> > stretching spaces and by slightly increasing the width of the glyph 
> > for tsek characters (which follow every syllable).
> 
> Yes, this is the justification I saw in the rest of the 
> Tibetan books I found.
> There was a slight bit of extra space after every tsek mark 
> in a justified line. However, as I noted in the word-spacing section
>    
> http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/specs/css3-text/scratchpa
d#word-spacing
> I'm not sure if that extra space should ideally be after the 
> tsek mark or distributed on both sides of it. If you've got 
> some advice on that, too, I'd appreciate it.
> 
> (The 'inter-word' keyword, as currently defined, would invoke 
> this behavior.)
> 
> > [It should be noted that these tsek characters (U+0F0B) 
> also provide 
> > the primarily line break opportunity in Tibetan and Dzongkha text.]
> 
> [Noted, although CSS3 Text doesn't cover line breaking rules; 
> UAX14 does.]
> 
> Thank you for your comments.
> 
> ~fantasai
> 

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Received on Tuesday, 9 January 2007 11:35:56 UTC