[sword-devel] Japanese Ruby Characters

[Chris Little]

On 12/27/2009 4:26 PM, Troy A. Griffitts wrote:
> Since we're still looking into the clucene issues before release, we can
> get this into 1.6.1, but I'd like feedback from the projects using
> osishtmlhref.
>
> Does this patch mess things up for anyone? I doubt many people were
> using the previous "(<gloss>)" display for anything and were simply
> never turning on gloss support with:
>
> mgr->setGlobalOption("Ruby", "On");

I don't recall whether OSISHTMLHREF had any support for @gloss or not in 
1.6.0, so it may be a new feature entirely. Ruby support (via @gloss) is 
definitely not older than 1.6.0.

Before committing the patch, I checked <ruby> support in the major HTML 
renderers, and found it much improved over past performance.

IE has worked correctly for many years, so that's no surprise. Firefox 
and Safari both worked fine. Chrome demonstrated one of the most 
spectacular failures possible, by completely eliminating the contents of 
<ruby>, but that might be due to my running a dev version. You can check 
your browser on your platform here: 
http://www.alanflavell.org.uk/www/umusalu.html

XHTML Ruby annotation should degrade gracefully from correct ruby layout 
to the backup, which will output the contents of the <rp> elements. So 
given an element <w gloss="rubytext">annotated</w> and using Ian's 
patch, a renderer that supports <ruby> will display something like:

annotated
rubytext

But a renderer incapable of understanding <ruby> should instead display:

anotated (rubytext)

> Having a look at this, is "Ruby" the best term for us to use for gloss
> support? i.e. Is "ruby" a linguistics term or an XHTML term?

At present, we only use OSIS @gloss to hold Japanese ruby in the 
Japanese texts, so translating it back to XHTML <ruby> makes total 
sense. Even for non-Japanese cases, it's a very sensible way of 
rendering glosses since ruby are essentially glosses (though I'd 
entertain arguments that they would be better in @xlit).

--Chris