Re: Mixed scripts, typesetting

Arnt Richard Johansen wrote:

>Oh, that's very cool!
>
I agree.

> Is that Manchu/Mongolian acting as furigana on
>Chinese characters? I suppose that must be *very* difficult to typeset
>indeed, inasmuch as only Japanese uses furigana to a large degree, and
>software that supports that kind of thing, is probably hardwired to use
>*only* kana and kanji.
>
Actually, no. That would be stupid and more complex to do than allowing
any characters in the gloss and in the main part, assuming you can
already support other characters. XHTML 1.1 has support for ruby text,
and has no limitations on what chars can go in the base and in the
gloss. (ruby=furigana, it just comes from the (old?) English name for
the text size usually used to typeset them). (Of course, whether your
browser supports it is another matter.)

>I would have researched LaTeX and its macro packages, though.
>
I haven't looked, but I've never come across something that does rubies.
I don't imagine it'd be very hard to hack something up though.

> It is very
>flexible, and supports many different scripts, but I think making it
>output vertical writing might be the biggest challenge.
>
>
Depends on the direction it goes, actually. If it's left-to-right
rotated clockwise ninety degrees (CJK), it's just a matter of a
rotation. If it's right-to-left rotated clockwise ninety degrees, you
had to have something like TeX--XeT installed so that you can do
right-to-left typesetting and then rotate it (or at least, that's how
MongTeX, which lets you typeset Mongolian, implements it). Rotation
requires output (eventually) to PS or PDFs (and other formats besides,
just not DVIs).

--
Tristan                  <kesuari@...>