[css3-writing-modes] Default glyph orientation table from Toppan Printing

Toppan Printing Co. Ltd[1], one of the biggest printing company in Japan, kindly offered their glyph orientation table and allowed me to share the table publicly.

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2011Oct/att-0029/toppan-ucs-convlist-20111025.pdf

There are a few notes:

1. This table may not reflect actual common usage patterns for a few reasons.
   a. The table is a "default table" when their clients do not specify orientations. In general, since their clients are mostly professional publishers/editors rather than individual authors, they do receive glyph orientation specification along with the source text. For instance, the table sets full-width alpha-numeric to be sideways, but I was told that they usually receive printing specifications to set them upright along with the source text.
   b. More often, they receive in Word or other word processor file format, in which case the application's behavior is honored as the default orientation.
   c. Since it's for professional materials, it usually goes through a few paths of proofs.

2. The 4th column is their internal category ID and is defined as follows:
   0200: Roman
   0300: Russian
   0400: Greek
   7E00: Japanese punctuation characters (vary by fonts)
   7F00: Japanese punctuation characters (do not vary by fonts -- I do not understand the diff with 7E00 very well yet)

3. Their process to determine glyph orientation is a little different from our approach. They map Unicode code points to the category ID described above. The category determines the font using so-called "composite font" feature, just like the one in Word or InDesign--assign one font for Roman, one for East Asian for a span (Word has another slot for complex scripts, so 3 fonts for every span.) The font knows the default glyph orientation. This table is created specifically for us by combining the category table and tables in fonts.

#3 makes me feel that fantasai's idea to add tailoring values[2] is wonderful; today, publishers can specify, say, "all Greek to upright" by specifying such font, and the composite font system handles a group of code points to change their orientations. We won't have the idea to change orientation by fonts, but tailoring values give authors similar method to switch glyph orientation of a category by a single switch.

Lastly, allow me to show my appreciation to Kyoji Tahara and his colleagues at Toppan Printing Co. Ltd for creating this table for us.


[1] http://www.toppan.co.jp/english/
[2] http://wiki.csswg.org/spec/utr50#tailoring

Regards,
Koji

Received on Thursday, 27 October 2011 07:03:55 UTC