RE: [CSS3 Text] Tibetan justification

Last week I visited the Ethnic Publishing House in Beijing (I have a friend who works there). I visited Mongolian, Tibetan and Uighur typesetters and have the basic rules used for publishing these languages. I can return to the Ethnic Publishing House at any time to get more information if necessary.

Tibetan justification today *does not* use the TSEG characters to fill out the lines. That was only done on wooden blocks where there was no ability to micro space between the TSEG and the beginning of a syllable.

Paul


-----Original Message-----
From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Richard Ishida
Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 3:37 AM
To: 'fantasai'; c.fynn@btopenworld.com
Cc: www-style@w3.org; asmus@unicode.org; 'Mark Davis'; 'WWW International'
Subject: 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)
 
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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 15:55:44 UTC