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

Ah, I see. Thank you Makoto! The reference specifically to symbols and
punctuation confused me. Is this just a bigger problem for those types of
glyphs?

--Brady

On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 4:45 PM, MURATA Makoto <eb2m-mrt@asahi-net.or.jp>wrote:

> 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
>