[css3-text] text-transform: han-numerals

[Adding back www-style]
On 10/26/2010 06:28 AM, MURATA Makoto (FAMILY Given) wrote:
 >> On 2010/10/26 17:26, John Daggett wrote:
 >>> Martin J. Dürst wrote:
 >>> >   Sorry to jump into this discussion without potentially understanding all
 >>> >   the details, but while it is to a large extent possible e.g. in Japanese
 >>> >   to switch from horizontal to vertical just by switching styling, there
 >>> >   are some aspects of this switch that need more work. A typical example
 >>> >   is that in horizontal text, you may use Arabic numerals (0123...),
 >>> >   whereas in vertical text, Kanji numbers (�Z���O...) may be preferred.
 >>>
 >>> Might be better to define 'chinese-numerals' as a value for
 >>> 'text-transform', which transforms u+030-039 to the appropriate chinese
 >>> numeral characters. Then you would simply have:
 >>> horizonal.css: .number { text-transform: none; }
 >>> vertical.css:  .number { text-transform: chinese-numerals; }
 >>>
 >>> The ability to have different stylesheets for different writing modes
 >>> provides authors more options for styling content.
>
> Martin and John,
>
> I once tried find some definitions of han-ideographic representations of
> numbers.  I find that there are no standards or laws.  Some laws
> mention example representations, but they are just too sketchy.
>
> How do Japanese represent numbers using han-ideographic characters?
> There are more than one way to represent numbers.
>
> For example, 35 can be represented by
>
> 三五,
> 三十五,
> 参五, or
> 参拾五
>
> 305 can be represented by
>
> 三〇五,
> 三百五,
> 参百五, or
> 参〇五
>
> and 10035 can be represented by
>
> 一万三十五,
> 壱萬参拾五,
> 壱〇〇参五,
> 一〇〇三五, or
> １万３５
>
> I do not believe that we can provide automatic conversion from numbers
> to han-ideographic representations.

It's true that there are many ways to represent numbers in Han characters.
It's also true that there are many ways to represent numbers in the Latin
script. I can write

1,000,000
1 million
one million
etc.

But, as with the various Han representations, only one of those is in a
decimal system: the others are mixtures of digits and words. We can
transform decimal to decimal easily. And I think this is adequate for
hitting the 80% use case.

For anyone who wants to do something more complicated, then more markup
support is needed. But even then, HTML+CSS can do it:

   <abbr class="number" title="三十五">35</abbr>

vertical.css:
   abbr.number { content: attr(title) }

So I don't really see this issue as a problem. Also, I think it is not
a showstopper if numbers cannot be converted from the preferred form
for vertical to the preferred form for horizontal: it might not adhere
to the full force of typographic tradition, but using decimal digits
in vertical is neither wrong nor uncommon.

~fantasai

Received on Tuesday, 26 October 2010 18:20:09 UTC