Jens Frank wrote:
On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 03:41:29PM +0900, Makoto &
Guillaume wrote:
Other thing, I tried to make a template to be able
to write Japanese
furigana (small letters over kanjis to give the pronunciation) into
articles. I tried this
Shouldn't UTF-8 provide the needed diacritic characters needed to compose
these, without needing HTML tables?
I don't think it does. The standard way of writing many Japanese words
is to use kanji (or at least to partially use kanji), which are
ideographs, similar to the Chinese alphabet (indeed, kanji is
essentially an adapted Chinese alphabet). Since ideographic alphabets
aren't phonetically-based, it's not generally possible for people who
don't know a particular character to pronounce it, in the way one can
"sound out" unknown words in phonetically-based alphabets. To overcome
that, sometimes Japanese kanji characters are "spelled out" phonetically
using the phonetic hiragana alphabet, using small characters placed
either above the corresponding kanji (in horizontal text) or next to the
kanji (in vertical text).
So it's really something more on the publication-layout level than on
the character level, which is why it'll probably never be in Unicode,
even as a combinator sort of thing.
-Mark