[HN Gopher] Requirements for Japanese Text Layout
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       Requirements for Japanese Text Layout
        
       Author : PaulHoule
       Score  : 80 points
       Date   : 2022-11-16 08:24 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.w3.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.w3.org)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | frivoal wrote:
       | If you like this, there's a whole family of such documents:
       | 
       | Chinese: https://www.w3.org/TR/clreq/
       | 
       | Ethiopic: https://www.w3.org/TR/elreq/
       | 
       | Arabic: https://www.w3.org/TR/alreq/
       | 
       | Tibetan: https://www.w3.org/TR/tlreq/
       | 
       | Korean: https://www.w3.org/TR/klreq/
       | 
       | Indic: https://www.w3.org/TR/ilreq/
       | 
       | Tamil: https://www.w3.org/TR/ilreq-taml/
       | 
       | Japanese was the first in the series, but the rest is equally
       | fascinating (even if the documents may be somewhat less mature)
        
         | PaulHoule wrote:
         | I like that Chinese one because I am working on a project
         | involving Chinese text now and because it is written in three
         | character sets: English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
        
           | zasdffaa wrote:
           | Ah, that's why the Chinese appears twice. I didn't see a
           | difference between them (not that I was looking hard).
           | 
           | A question for you, the Chinese characters seem very much
           | more complex eg Dan Ye Bao Gua Za Zhi , which makes me wonder
           | if they're meant to be read at the same font size as the
           | english text or if they'd typically be printed larger?
           | 
           | Also, the full stops and commas seem to be used in Chinese
           | text, as these inherited from european script or did they
           | always exist in some form?
        
             | vore wrote:
             | Chinese text is usually the same size as English text: I
             | think people just get used to the vague shape of them and
             | don't actually need to see every stroke precisely.
             | 
             | Only the period .  and the enumeration comma ,  existed
             | before European influences.
        
       | JKCalhoun wrote:
       | This English-only white guy was tasked with supporting Ruby in an
       | early implementation of iBooks. Ha ha, that was a whole new world
       | I had to try to come up to speed on. In the end it was, for my
       | part, a lot of wrangling with CoreText to get a vertical layout
       | positioned correctly.
       | 
       | Just scrolling through this site makes my head spin. (Also makes
       | me wonder what the hell Apple were thinking when they dropped
       | that in _my_ lap.)
       | 
       | I assumed that WebView would eventually add support for Ruby and
       | my code could be ripped out ... I have no idea if that ever came
       | to pass (I moved to another team within Apple not long after I
       | had finished the Ruby code).
        
         | PaulHoule wrote:
         | One of my hobbies is printing "three-sided cards" that
         | frequently have anime characters as subjects, these have a
         | description of of the image in English at the bottom left but I
         | pull out proper names in Japanese and set them vertically on
         | the upper right. Here is one example
         | 
         | https://gen5.info/$/Q.AEW.3FW2XIZUINQ/BACK800/0278.PNG
         | 
         | which is part of this group of cards:
         | 
         | https://gen5.info/$/Q.AEW.3FW2XIZUINQ/
         | 
         | I had to write my own layout engine for vertical CJK text which
         | to first order is not very hard because the characters are all
         | squares and I don't need to deal with punctuation, Ruby, and
         | all that. What is still a hassle is mixing Roman characters in
         | and having them look good, as these frequently turn up in
         | proper names. For instance the second season of the popular
         | anime Sailor Moon (seramun) is called Sailor Moon R (seramunR).
        
         | jfk13 wrote:
         | Well, there's definitely Ruby support in the Webkit engine
         | these days (as well as in Gecko and Blink); you can do
         | something like                   data:text/html,<h1><ruby><rb>H
         | </rb><rt>hacker</rt><rb>N</rb><rt>news</rt></ruby>
         | 
         | in the browser URL bar to see it at work.
         | 
         | Whether iBooks has adopted that in place of your code ... I
         | have no idea.
        
         | Jiro wrote:
         | >Just scrolling through this site makes my head spin.
         | 
         | It's not as bad as it looks. It repeats everything in two
         | languages (you can click "English" on the right to get rid of
         | that), and there's a large section at the end which lists
         | characters, then a glossary.
        
       | Shugyousha wrote:
       | As a typography enthusiast (and Japanese Studies major ...) I
       | have looked at this page purely for fun multiple times. Great
       | resource!
        
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       (page generated 2022-11-17 23:02 UTC)