Some suggestions of symbols in TC

[ButTaiwan]

The 4 suggestions are also applicable in SHSans.

(1) Brackets are good to be positioned at center

In Traditional Chinese typesetting, all symbols are usually considered as a full-width character. Not only ，。：！？, but also brackets. (Note: In Japanese or Simplified Chinese, brackets are considered as a half-width character with a half-width space.) Most of Traditional Chinese text is Betagumi, Japanese style brackets looks have too large space. And it's not beautiful.

(2) Proportional width of symbols looks strange

Since the symbols are positioned at center, they looks too crowded when proportional width is ON. 50% width is not ideal. I suggest that remove palt information of the symbols. (But keep hwid information for advanced users.)

(3) Quotation or Apostrophe

Character U+2019 is used as a quotation mark and a apostrophe. The width of this character is a difficult historical problem.

However, in Traditional Chinese text, quotation marks are usually be 「」. In most cases, U+2019 is used as a apostrophe. And very few as a quotation mark. (In Simplified Chinese, the story is different.) So I suggest that U+2018 and U+2019 is better to be designed in a proportional width. (like Japanese or Korean ones.)

(4) Tone marks of Bopomofo

The second, third, fourth tone mark is too small. They should be the same size of Bopomofos.

And, the direction of second tone mark is wrong. (Correct: Left-down to right-up.)

[kenlunde]

Thank you for the useful and actionable feedback. I will eventually add appropriate items to the consolidated issues that reflect changes based on the above.

[Explorer09]

@ButTaiwan Which software did you use when rendering the zhuyin annotation in the picture above? AFAIK, there are Chinese fonts that present tone mark glyphs in superscript form and that software should not superscript them again.

[Explorer09]

Note: The advantage of making tone marks superscript by default is that they can display smoothly with horizontal, Bopomofo plain text. See this ㄅㄞˇㄎㄜ ㄑㄩㄢˊㄕㄨ example (picture from Wikipedia):

[ButTaiwan]

That's Microsoft Word. Superscript design is only suitable for horizontal text, and they looks bad in vertical text cases. Anyway, tone marks will be used in Word, HTML rubys, or other many places. They always treat sign mark as a non-superscript glyph.

http://language.moe.gov.tw/001/Upload/files/site_content/M0001/juyin/html_ch/index.html In this official document of MOE, the size of tone marks is 5/8 or 5/9 of a bopomofo letter. However, in these examples, tone marks are designed to fill in the bounding box, and bomopofo letters are not. So, although the ratio is 5:8 or 5:9, the size of tone marks and bopomofo letters looks nearly.

I think that tone marks can be designed small than bopomofo letters, but only a little. Picture of Wikipedia is not really accord with MOE official manual.

[Explorer09]

I'm not sure if ruby annotation software can detect if the glyphs are in superscript form or not. I just don't like the tone glyphs be rendered full size in the normal text. Maybe the font designers know more about the technicalities here and can explain better.

[KrasnayaPloshchad]

Character U+2019 is used as a quotation mark and a apostrophe. The width of this character is a difficult historical problem.

Source Han Serif has localized form for U+2019, so you can switch its width by switching language for text. as far as I know, LibreOffice, Scribus (1.5.3+), Adobe InDesign support it, HTML can switch via inserting lang="XXX" attribute. Does it works well with MS Word?

The second, third, fourth tone mark is too small. They should be the same size of Bopomofos.

And, the direction of second tone mark is wrong. (Correct: Left-down to right-up.)

I think adding support for combining marks (U+0358 (maybe U+0307?), U+0304, U+0301, U+030C, U+0300) would help.

[ButTaiwan]

Source Han Serif has localized form for U+2019

I know. However, I think that it's a strange specification that although U+2019 is used as a apostrophe in most of cases in Traditional Chinese, and people have to set it as a Japanese text to get a ideal result.

I think adding support for combining marks

I think you are confused about it with Simplified Chinese ones. Tone marks are combined with alphabets in Pinyin of Simplified Chinese, and their size are usually smaller. And tone marks are always be treat as isolate characters in Traditional Chinese, and their size are bigger.

In MOE standard, tone marks of bomopofo is positioned on upright side of last bomopofo letter. And the real position is different in horizontal form and a vertical form. So, combining marks are not used in bopomofos.

Vertical form:

Horizontal form:

[KrasnayaPloshchad]

I think you are confused about it with Simplified Chinese ones. Tone marks are combined with alphabets in Pinyin of Simplified Chinese, and their size are usually smaller. And tone marks are always be treat as isolate characters in Traditional Chinese, and their size are bigger.

In MOE standard, tone marks of bomopofo is positioned on upright side of last bomopofo letter. And the real position is different in horizontal form and a vertical form. So, combining marks are not used in bopomofos.

I just thought that adding combining marks could making tone marks combine with bomopofo and fitting into character frame, thus bring less trouble. Maybe I made misunderstanding, but I also think we can try to invesgate how Hangul tone marks (U+302E, U+302F) works, then making similar implementation to bopomofo.

[ButTaiwan]

I think adding support for combining marks

I understand your opinion now. I agree that if we can design a set of isolated tone marks and a set of combining tone marks, that will be good. However, that should be supported by text-processing applications, browsers and IMEs, and got usable.

I've tried many browsers, and almost no any browser support x-axis moving of GPOS in vertical texts. Typesetting of Bopomofo is still troublesome in this day. For example, U+02D9 U+02C9 U+02CA U+02C7 U+02CB are defined as marks in Unicode. And all browser will turn them 90 degrees in vertical form.

So maybe we should try to create a new standard for bopomofo processing first...

[KrasnayaPloshchad]

@ButTaiwan In harfbuzz#532 I found another solution is just add vkrn to adjust tone marks' position.

[ButTaiwan]

@KrasnayaPloshchad Yes, the first vkrn font is made by me.

Indeed, I think is better to use mark feature to do the combining marks things. (due to OpenType spec) However, the position of tone marks is different in horizontal text and vertical text. And I don't know how to do that in mark feature. That why I used kern and vkrn features. In implementation, it's NOT doing the kerning works. It DO apply base - mark positioning.

[KrasnayaPloshchad]

So what about ccmp feature?

[lapomme]

Are there currently any plans to adjust the bracket position for TW/HK Source Han Sans/Serif?