RE: [css3-text] text-emphasis marks in Tibetan

For more on this (and perhaps a relevant question ;) see
http://rishida.net/blog/?p=101

 

Note that in my example one of the emphasis marks is placed such that it
straddles two characters (the one to the far right) in order to appear in
the centre of a syllable. This is presumably would be much harder to do
using Unicode characters embedded in the string itself – not to mention that
issues surrounding the need for applications to ignore such characters for
searching, sorting, etc, which still cause problems for even very common
scripts such as Arabic.

 

RI

 

============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/





 

From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf
Of John Hudson
Sent: 23 November 2010 15:10
To: fantasai
Cc: www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: [css3-text] text-emphasis marks in Tibetan

 

fantasai wrote:

> I have two Tibetan books here (ISBN 7-105-03459-9 and ISBN 7-105-0004-2)
> that use emphasis marks. They are placed below each "word" (where "word"
> is the linguistic unit separated by tsek marks).

> The two symbols I see are the filled circle and a little handwritten-style
> "x".

Was there a question regarding these?

The filling of the circle may be an artefact of writing. An open circle
Tibetan emphasis mark is encoded in Unicode as U+0F37. There is also
U+0F35, an honorific emphasis mark, and assorted other below-base
symbols in the Unicode Tibetan block. It may be that the x you see in
the books is a variant of one or other of these (a spacing x mark is one
of the Tibetan astrological signs).

I presume you are wondering about how these marks are to be positioned
relative to words rather than relative to base characters or grapheme
clusters within words. I had the same question years ago regarding the
Hebrew masoretic circle (U+05AF), which is positioned over the centre of
a word. The answer in that case was that it was up to the author to
insert the combining mark character in an appropriate place in the
middle of the word, and because the mark might need to interact
typographically with other above marks, e.g. be contextually offset
left/right or even raised to avoid collision, one really didn't want to
remove the mark from the glyph string and try to position is separately
relative to the whole word.

If the Tibetan emphasis marks to which you refer are in Unicode, and if
they are encoded as combining marks, then I suspect the same would be
true for them.

JH

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