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

Brady,

This is about the default choice of a) and b) shown in
"3.2.3 Mixed Text Composition in Vertical Writing Mode" in
the W3C Note "Requirements for Japanese Text Layout".
Which of the two is default for which character?  UTR#50
is intended to make this point clear, but different opinions
certaily exist even in Japan.

http://www.w3.org/TR/jlreq/#en-subheading2_2_2

Regards,
Makoto

2012/1/14 Brady Duga <duga@ljug.com>:
> 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
>>
>>
>



-- 

Praying for the victims of the Japan Tohoku earthquake

Makoto

Received on Saturday, 14 January 2012 00:45:50 UTC