RE: Advanced Font Features

In the main, hiragana is used for grammatical endings, particles and
[indigenous Japanese words that aren't rendered by kanji (han) characters].


Katakana are used for the many foreign loan words in Japanese.

They are not usually interchangeable or alternative 'presentational forms'
of the same character, even though they cover pretty much the same
syllable-based phonetic sounds.

Hth,
RI

For a simple introduction with pictures, see
http://rishida.net/scripts/tutorial/slides/Slide0080.html and the following
slides.


============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
 
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/blog/
http://rishida.net/

 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf
> Of Christoph Päper
> Sent: 20 January 2008 23:19
> To: CSS Style
> Subject: Re: Advanced Font Features
> 
> 
> fantasai:
> > Christoph Päper wrote:
> >> Would it be acceptable for Japanese to switch display between
> >> Katakana and Hiragana for "font-style: italic"?
> >
> > No. This is closer to text-transform: it's not a font change, but a
> > codepoint change.
> > A new value for text-transform would make more sense.
> 
> I know that they have separate codepoints, and already had before
> Unicode. I just never understood exactly why. The distinction to me
> seems not to be much different than blackletter ./. roman (foreign
> terms were typeset in Antiqua fonts in Fraktur German) or roman ./.
> italic (foreign terms are often set italic). Of course none of those
> compare flawlessly.
> 
> I'm really nowhere close to have a deeper understanding of Asian
> orthography and typography, so maybe the difference is indeed more
> like uppercase ./. lowercase and hence belongs to |text-transform|.
> I'd just like to have pancultural properties and values if possible,
> keeping the total number low, although it might be counter-intuitive
> if, for lack of a better example, |smallcaps| selected half-width
> forms in East Asian texts.
> 
> Another thing I was thinking about -- perhaps not long enough yet --
> is a set of properties for setting the relative font size
> independently for alphabetic (single case or upper and lower case),
> syllabic and logo-/ideographic characters:
> 
>    font-size: 12px;
>    font-size-bicameral: 1.0em; /* = 12px */
>    font-size-logograph: 1.5em; /* = 18px */

Received on Monday, 21 January 2008 17:18:48 UTC