Re: [CSS3 Text] Tibetan Emphasis marks

Paul Nelson (ATC) wrote:

> Here are the basic rules for the Tibetan emphasis mark.

> 1. one mark per syllable;
> 2. mark is positioned at the center of each syllable;
> 3. mark fits close to the text;
> 4. all marks in a line may or may not align to each other vertically.

Yes.

Tibetan 'syllable' here being all the consonant and vowel mark characters 
between two punctuation mark or space characters. Set of Tibetan punctuation 
marks in this case typically should probably include: U+0F06 - U+0F14, U+0FBE, 
U+0FBF, U+0FD0-U+0FD2 (with U+0F0B & U+0F0D being by far the most frequent 
Tibetan 'syllable' delimiters).

> As such one might say that the emphasis could be applied as a CSS markup and 
> the User Agent would implement the rules according to the manner in which they 
> would choose to do this.

> I would submit that this feature, if accepted for consideration should not be normative.

> 1. The use of the Tibetan Emphasis marks are very limited in the scope in which they are used. 
>   Implementing support for this would most likely not be a high priority for any company.

Of course it would unlikely be a high priority for commercial implementations.

> 2. The tight coupling to the cluster handling of Tibetan this would require special low 
level code for centering the mark on the syllable. Not trivial code and not 
something the
UA would necessarily be able to handle unless they also implement the Tibetan 
shaping engine.

Although "tight coupling" would be very nice - I  don't think it is crucial in 
most HTML / XHTML / XML applications where I can see this being used. The main 
thing is the we should be able to properly indicate the emphasis. (Of course 
without "tight coupling" line spacing could be affected, since the marks would
need fall in a layer beneath the Tibetan glyphs. The same seems to be the case 
with CJK "seed" emphasis marks.)

> It would be easy enough to add support for this to CSS3 'text-emphasis' 
> property by adding something the following values 
> (not intuitive names and prone to typographic errors):

> nyizla - uses the Tibetan mark U+0F35 as the emphasis mark

- the Tibetan name translates as "sun moon"

> sgorrtags - uses the Tibetan mark U+0F37 as the emphasis mark

- the Tibetan name translates as "round mark"

Perhaps better names could be derived from these?

> The use of these marks for other than Tibetan text would need to be 
> undefined to preclude people doing "creative" things with this property.


> Doing the above would make it possible to style Tibetan emphasis marks. 
> However, it does not guarantee that support for this property would be added in UAs.

Of course not - there is never a guarantee with this sort of thing, but at least 
it would open up the possibility of support.

> Paul

Many thanks for considering this.

regards

- Chris

Received on Monday, 9 July 2007 12:09:26 UTC