Re: [css-ruby] ruby-position: inter-character

On 19/09/2014 15:59, Bobby Tung wrote:
> There's a document published by Institute for Information Industry(iii)
> Taiwan in 2011 to tell how to support EPUB 3 for Reading System[1]. In
> page 52, it told that tone mark should be implied by nested ruby to make
> sure be put aside.
>
> So I always marked Bopomofo in this way.
>
> <ruby>來<rt><ruby>ㄌㄞ<rt>ˊ</rt></ruby></rt></ruby>
>
> I don't think its an ideal way. But if we marked Bopomofo like this:
>
> <ruby>來<rt>ㄌㄞˊ</rt></ruby>
>
> To put tone mark aside may depend on 1, render engine or 2, OpenType
> feature (GPOS/GSUB).
>
> But recently I found another issue: when Bopomobo appears inline, tone
> mark as ruby[2].
>
> It has same structure as nested ruby:
>
> ...不應該讀「<ruby>ㄧㄤ<rt>ˇ</rt></ruby>」$)A#,...
>
> So should Bopomofo ruby be nested or not? I am a little confusing.
>
> [1]:
> https://www.dropbox.com/s/o68qmp707rc69jp/Publication%20software%20specification.pdf
> [2]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Sep/0186.html


I guess two things worry me about the nested approach:

[1] it's quite a long of markup - must be a pain for authors

[2] it's not clear to me how the tone mark would end up in the right 
place, since it's not supposed to be centred, nor is it supposed to be 
aligned to the edge of the box according to 
http://www.edu.tw/files/site_content/M0001/juyin/jb99.htm?open.

If it's achievable using things like CSS margins/padding, it again must 
be a little complicated for authors to get it right.

I'm inclined to think that all this should be really simple for the 
content author. They should just say 'make this work like bopomofo ruby' 
and use a minimum of markup and CSS.

I see your point about inline bopomofo also positioning tone marks in a 
way that looks a little like ruby, but I suspect we have the same issue 
in terms of positioning the tone mark correctly(?). (In fact, it may be 
more of an issue because the glyphs are bigger.)

I also can't help feeling that it's not actually ruby, and so we ought 
not to use ruby markup for it.

On the face of it, maybe that's a case where opentype would be useful, 
but I think there are also cases where the tone mark just appears as a 
spacing character after the zhuyin letters, no?  If so, we'd need some 
kind of switch for content authors to indicate which they wanted.

Getting back to the actual ruby case, though, is there any mileage in 
the idea that browsers should use opentype features if ruby tone mark 
positioning is supported, but otherwise use layout?  That might enable 
us to move forward with Dave's solution in the near term and for fonts 
that don't support opentype, and bring in the opentype solution when/if 
it becomes available in the future. (I remember we already had some 
wording like this for tate-chu-yoko.)



There's also one other aspect related to bopomofo ruby that I'm not 
clear about.

The light tone appears at the top of the vertical stack, but there seems 
to be some debate about where the character U+02D9 should appear in 
relation to the other zhuyin letters.

I believe that nominally you'd expect it to follow the characters in the 
zhuyin syllable, even though it is displayed before them. (It would be 
interesting actually, Bobby, if you have any examples of non-ruby 
bopomofo like the ones you just showed us that use the light tone - so 
we could see where it's placed - especially horizontal examples.)  I 
noticed that https://www.moedict.tw/%E5%AD%90 stores the light tone 
before the zhuyin letters, though I don't know if that's just to 
simplify things(?).

I suppose it's possible and maybe even probable that content authors 
would naturally type it before the syllable for ruby even if they typed 
it after for non-ruby zhuyin. Maybe it's not necessary to be overly 
purist about it. [1]

(One snag may occur, I guess, if you wanted to simply replace the hanzi 
with the bopomofo, as you may sometimes want to do for kanji+hiragana 
ruby, for kids/accessibility, etc.  On the other hand, I've heard that 
where this occurs, the bopomofo tends to still be vertical, even in 
horizontal text - though i'm not sure that's always the case.)

ri




[1] more on this at 
http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2013-m11/0053.html

Received on Friday, 19 September 2014 16:28:53 UTC