East Asian Emphasis Marks (Japanese bouten, etc)

From: fantasai (fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net)
Date: Sun Mar 12 2006 - 16:50:38 CST

  • Next message: Doug Ewell: "Re: East Asian Emphasis Marks (Japanese bouten, etc)"

    I'm currently going through emphasis marks used in East Asian texts
    to see what options we need to define in CSS. One of the questions I
    have is, where do the glyphs come from? Kobayashi Tatsuo and I looked
    through the Unicode repetoire last week, and we found
       U+FE45 SESAME DOT
       U+FE46 WHITE SESAME DOT
    which covers only two of the shapes. Also, they are in the compatibility
    forms block, so their use is discouraged.

    Paul Nelson says Microsoft uses fixed shapes for these emphasis marks.

    In the case of the sesame at least, the shape in printed materials closely
    parallels U+3001 IDEOGRAPHIC COMMA, which is provided by the font.
    I would like to know, is there a way, should there be a way, for the font
    in use to have some say over the glyph shape for emphasis marks?

    As for other shapes, I have scanned in a few examples:
       http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/discuss/emphasis-marks/
    I also remember a Tibetan book using x-shaped marks.

    Any comments on shapes, usage patterns, usefulness of various settings,
    etc. would be much appreciated.

    ~fantasai

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