Re: [css3-writing-modes] A report from a meeting w/Japanese publishing group

Hi Koji,

This all sounds great - always nice to see someone working on
interoperability tests! I am little confused by the problem they have with
glyph orientation. Is this just a failure of some UAs to properly apply
glyph substitutions when rendering vertical text, or is it more complex
then that?

--Brady

On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 9:10 AM, Koji Ishii <kojiishi@gluesoft.co.jp> wrote:

> I had a meeting with Kadokawa, one of the biggest publishing company group
> in Japan. Guys working on EPUB in Japan had setup a meeting with them and
> kindly invited me, so I'm writing this to share what I heard at the meeting
> with whom interested in digital publishing situations in Japan.
>
> About a month ago, the EBPAJ (The Electronic Book Publishers Association
> of Japan)[1] made an announcement[2] that they have started a project to
> test interoperability of EPUB readers. As EPUB3 became REC last October,
> and readers started appearing in the market, they soon realized that
> interoperability is one of the issues they need to resolve. The EBPAJ is
> primarily focused on magazines, and Kadokawa is one of the central member
> of the activity within the EBPAJ.
>
> They believe in future of EPUB and W3C technologies so much that they want
> to solve problems they can, and this project is one of such efforts.
> They're planning to do the followings in this project:
>
> 1. Listen to the member publishers to create a list of features and test
> cases they would care.
> 2. Create a test suite and ask which features vendors support. The group
> will also run tests for major readers and browsers by themselves.
> 3. Publish the result so that content holders can decide which platforms
> to support. They expect the result also helps creating in-house rules to
> author interoperable HTML/CSS/EPUB for readers/browsers they want to
> support. They target to publish the result on March 2012.
>
> They also mentioned that the glyph orientation in vertical text flow is
> one of the issues they are looking into, which is one of the hottest topic
> in writing-modes[3] and UTR#50[4]. It used to happen in the past that
> digital publishing platforms rendering different glyph orientation by
> OS/fonts, so they were not surprised much, but they recognized that EPUB
> has the issue and that they need to investigate further. They're welcoming
> our efforts to define orientations in the spec, although, no promise on
> dates is one of the biggest concern. How they would test it hasn't
> finalized yet, I'll keep in touch with them.
>
> It looked to me that they were a bit surprised that many symbol and
> punctuation glyphs used in their contents appear in sideways in today's
> implementations, more than in other existing digital publishing platforms.
> But they're professional content holders that, once spec was finalized and
> implemented (or they have figured out behavior if spec didn't meet their
> timeframe,) they could create internal rules or system to wrap every symbol
> and punctuation character in <span>s and set the text-orientation
> property[5] on them. They said they can live with any rules as long as the
> rules are clear, there's a workaround (i.e., span + text-orientation
> property,) and it won't change, but it still holds true that the less
> <span>s they need to use, the better.
>
> [1] http://www.ebpaj.jp/ (Japanese)
> [2] http://www.ebpaj.jp/images/epub_20111216.pdf (Japanese)
> [3] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-writing-modes/
> [4] http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr50/
> [5] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-writing-modes/#text-orientation
>
> Regards,
> Koji
>
>
>