Requirements for Japanese Text Layout

https://www.w3.org/TR/jlreq/

by nxobject • 2 years ago

62 28 2 years ago

nxobject3• 2 years ago

Everything you wanted to know about Japanese typography, and more.

tkgally• 2 years ago

Yes, indeed. I’ve had a professional interest in Japanese typography for many years, having worked on many Japanese dictionaries and other publications, but this document contains much that I didn’t know.

nxobject3• 2 years ago

+1 to that – in the document's note sections there are a lot of typographical rules of style/aesthetic rules of thumb that are probably out of the scope of a W3C-style purely algorithmic specification, are very useful (e.g. indentations, conventional head/subhead/running section formatting, etc.)

ngcc_hk• 2 years ago

Very interesting. And provide both Japanese and English version (both separately and together) is a God sent.

sylware5• 2 years ago

Isn't text shapping more in the unicode scope than in w3c scope?

phonon• 2 years ago

This isn't glyph shaping, it's text layout.

sylware5• 2 years ago

Which is called text shaping.

????

re5i5tor• 2 years ago

In season 2 of Tokyo Vice, they show character Jake, a reporter for newspaper Meicho Shimbun, using a native Japanese “word” processor to type in his stories. Really fascinating and seems to be authentic.

dhosek2• 2 years ago

I remember being absolutely fascinated by the ability of 1980s/early 1990s Japanese laptops to manage input with a standard keyboard. Especially given the computing resources of the time, it seemed like serious dark magic.

wodenokoto• 2 years ago

The first time I watched battle royal I thought the hacking scene was film magic, because no way could the computer just change letters into Japanese characters like that.

astrange3• 2 years ago

Unlike Jake (Adelstein) himself, who whenever I've read any of his stories has obviously made it up. Especially the ones where he claims to know everyone in the yakuza.

wahnfrieden2• 2 years ago

Web has great support for Japanese. Apple native support on iOS and macOS is relatively abysmal, with piss poor support for basic needs like ruby text.

nxobject3• 2 years ago

Yeah – my understanding is that, if you really want a cross-platform product, you'll have to license a commercial engine.

wahnfrieden2• 2 years ago

I like using web views including rendering them to png or pdf

Apple has some janky old UIKit and less-so AppKit support for Japanese that's portable to use from SwiftUI so I get by without needing web views for every label. However it's still nice to just use a web view for primary content.

There's zero input support for advanced Japanese features on native Apple platforms basically, like ruby text editing, but they can be bolted on cleverly with work. Or just use a web view.

tupuc_speedrap• 2 years ago

This makes sense, most people from California rarely even leave their state let alone go to a different country

astrange3• 2 years ago

Japan is the second largest iOS market.

o11c• 2 years ago

Hm, I'm having a weird and interesting issue with this website.

I'm using Firefox ESR with the (recommended) Auto Tab Discard [1] extension to save memory for idle background tabs. Unlike prior extensions AFAIU this should be using largely native browser code paths.

When I return to the jlreq page after it has idled out, all the Japanese text comes back and the "English" button is inoperative until I click one of the other language options.

Whose bug is this?

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

mjevans• 2 years ago

I have no proof, but I suspect it's a firefox bug, as I've noticed other behavior that seems a LOT like: some process forces a tab to reload, but that trigger isn't fed to plugins (E.G. Dark Reader, and pages that are unexpectedly blindingly bright).

ATD might be useful as a way of triggering this behavior more reliably by exercising the discard and reload tabs.

Cloudef• 2 years ago

Funny that this pops on the front page just as i posted this on show hn https://github.com/Cloudef/zig-budoux

This site also nicely demonstrates how poorly web browsers break japanese text

omoikane• 2 years ago

I like how they have a dedicated section for mixing Japanese and western language:

https://www.w3.org/TR/jlreq/#japanese_and_western_mixed_text...

I wonder if there are considerations for other combinations, such as mixing Japanese with right-to-left text. Maybe the other combinations are not nearly as common?

knuckleheadsmif• 2 years ago

It is common in some contexts. Unicode also has within it formatting rules for a lot of this stuff although not the kind of rules you’ll find in a manual of style or a typesetting rule book.

Japanese can flow top to bottom and right to left as well with in books that are read left to right.

Requirements for Japanese Text Layout

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