From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Fri Jan 14 2011 - 11:25:25 CST
Shriramana Sharma wrote:
> Hello all. I just come from meeting a scholar of the Jaiminiya Sama
> Veda. He has shown me printed Jaiminiya material in Devanagari and
> Grantha where the svara markers in the form of syllables are placed
> *below* the main line. Apparently it is the standard practice in
> Grantha and also seen in Devanagari.
Ruby, in any meaning of the word, is outside the realm of my expertise, but
I can well imagine that Ruby-like annotations may be used that way. Whether
they are called "Ruby" is mostly a matter of classification.
> The Safari blog seems to indicate
> that HTML5/CSS3 support placing Ruby text below.
That's common practice in browsers that support Ruby markup - most
prominently IE, which has supported it long ago, unlike Firefox, which
apparently can't be bothered.
> Any idea on the level
> of support from word processing and/or publishing software (including
> TeX)?
As long as it is a matter of placement, I think it can be handled widely,
though with explicit instructions, rather than base on the language or
script.
For example, using IE, the following CSS style sheet places Ruby annotations
below the annotated text:
rt { vertical-align: -3.5em; }
(Why a large value like -3.5em? Well, IE uses a fairly small font for Ruby
annotations, and the em unit is the element's own font size.)
So this seems to be in the realm of software implementations and authoring
practices rather than standards and specifications. Conceivably, though, if
it is possible to establish rendering practices of Ruby-like texts for
different languages, it might be possible to encourage software vendors to
make such practices defaults for those languages.
-- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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