[Apologies to anyone who gets this message twice. The copy I sent yesterday
hasn't shown up on the list -- at least, not in my mail box -- so I'm
sending it again.]
At 10:46 AM 7/2/00 -0800, Christopher John Fynn wrote:
>> ... In any case, Furigana is definitely what Adobe had
>> in mind when they registered the <ruby> feature, as
>> is evident from the feature description.
>Is this OT ruby feature to be applied when e.g. a <ruby></ruby>
>tag is encountered in HTML / XML? Or is this supposed to be for
>a whole different mechanism? MSIE5 already seems to recognise
>the <ruby> tag in HTML and formats text appropriately.
The OT <ruby> feature is a glyph substitution feature, designed to work
with different application and markup conventions for ruby text. An OT font
with <ruby> support would contain glyph variants of the appropriate kana
characters, optically optimised for smaller sizes. When I posted my first
response on this topic, I thought I remembered that there was also a glyph
positioning element to the feature, but this turns out not to be so. The
<ruby> OT feature then is simply a way of making your furigana look good by
providing kana forms that are optimised for this purpose. Scaling and
positioning of the ruby glyphs is left to the application which may, as the
feature description notes, take user defined parameters. Sorry for any
confusion.
If, as I suspect, most browsers will be interpreting the HTML RUBY tag as
indicating furigana, the suitability of this mechanism for other forms of
annotation will depend on how close these are to the furigana model.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks
Vancouver, BC
http://www.tiro.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:05 EDT