Doug (and Michael also):
> What if I *want* to design an annotation-aware rendering mechanism?
> Suppose I read Section 13.6 and decide that, instead of just throwing
> the annotation characters away, I should attempt to display them
> directly above (and smaller than) the "normal" text, the way furigana
> are displayed above kanji.
>
> This would work not only for typical Japanese ruby, but also for
> Michael's English-or-Swedish-over-Bliss scenario. It might even be
> useful in assisting beleaguered Azerbaijanis, for example, by annotating
> Latin-script text with its Cyrillic equivalent. (Just a thought.)
>
> Would this be conformant?
Well, technically conformant, but not wise. If commonly available
display and rendering mechanisms are not rendering them as interlinear
annotations, then you aren't really providing much assistance here
by using a mechanism designed for internal anchors and trying to
turn it into something it isn't really up to snuff for.
Frankly, you would be much better off making use of the Ruby annotation
schemes available in markup languages, which will give you better
scoping and attribute mechanisms.
Stop worrying a moment about "Why are these characters standardized,
and why the hedoublehockeysticks can't I use them?!" and think about
the problem that furigana or any other interlinear annotation rendering
system has to address:
a. How are the annotations adjusted? Left-adjusted, centered,
something else? And what point(s) are they synched on?
b. If the annotated text or the annotation itself consist of
multiple units, are there subalignments? E.g.
note note note note
text text textextextext text
or
note note note note
text text textextextext text
c. Can an annotation itself be stacked into a multiline form?
note note note
nononononote
text
d. Can the text of the annotation itself in turn be annotated?
e. Can the text have two or more coequal annotations? And if so,
how are they aligned?
e. If the annotation is in a distinct style from the text it
annotates, how is that indicated and controlled?
f. How is line-break controlled on a line which also has an
annotation?
And so on. This is all the kind of stuff that clearly smacks to me
of document formatting concerns and rich text. Why anyone would consider
such things to be plain text rather escapes me.
--Ken
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Aug 14 2002 - 13:20:06 EDT