Ruby annotation

Ruby ( Japanese ル ビ rubi ) refers to an annotation system in which the text and its annotation appear on one line. This is mainly used in Japanese and Chinese texts to indicate the pronunciation, as the Chinese characters used there do not provide any information about the actual pronunciation in many cases. In Japanese this usage is also called furigana . Examples:

	と う	き ょ う		tō	kyō	Japanese pronunciation cues in Hiragana and Rōmaji
Tokyo	東	京		東	京
	ㄅ ㄟ ˇ	ㄐ ㄧ ㄥ		běi	jīng
Beijing	北	京		北	京	Chinese pronunciation notes in Zhuyin and Pinyin

In general, a phonetic script is used in addition to the actual text, which is written in Chinese characters. In Japanese these are the kana , in Chinese mainly zhuyin or pinyin.

Applications of Ruby

Ruby can be used for several reasons:

• because the character is rare and its pronunciation is unknown to most people (e.g. characters for personal names);
• because the character has more than one pronunciation and there is insufficient context to determine which to use;
• because the target group of the text is still learning the language and cannot be expected to always know the pronunciation and / or the meaning of the expression,
• because the author uses a non-standardized pronunciation for the characters, e.g. B. to emphasize puns puns ( dajare ) or to make it clear that they are spoken in another language.

In addition, Ruby can be used to indicate the meaning of a possibly uncommon (usually foreign language) slang expression instead of the pronunciation. This is generally used in spoken dialogue and only applies to Japanese publications. The most common form of ruby ​​is called furigana or yomigana and can be found in Japanese textbooks, daily newspapers, comics, and children's books.

In Japanese, some characters (e.g. the sokuon tsu っ , which indicates a doubling of the consonant before it) are usually written at half the size of a normal character. Written in Ruby, however, all characters were the same size. Only technological advances now allow certain characters to be rendered accurately.

In Chinese, the practice of giving phonetic cues using Ruby is rare, but it is systematically used in elementary school textbooks or dictionaries. The Chinese don't have a special name for it because it's not as common as it is in Japan. In Taiwan it is known as Zhuyin , the name of the phonetic system used for this purpose. It is always used vertically, as it were, since publications usually appear in vertical format and Zhuyin written horizontally is not easy to read. Where Zhuyin is not used, other Chinese phonetic systems (e.g. Hanyu Pinyin ) are used.

Ruby characters are not usually used in word-for-word translations between languages, not even for identical classical Chinese characters, since all natural languages ​​include idioms (in which word combinations have different meanings than the individual words), not the relationship - Adjacent words are often difficult to grasp and there is usually no exact and unambiguous translation for a given word. There are also difficulties when the source and target languages ​​have different writing directions (e.g. German is written from left to right, Hebrew from right to left). A well-known example of this is the Christian Bible, which was originally written in Koine , Hebrew, and some Aramaic . Very few can read these original languages ​​fluently. Therefore, many publications of the Christian Bible in their original languages ​​contain Ruby texts with word-for-word translations into another language, e.g. B. German as an aid. Such documents are often referred to as interlinear version documents (with the emphasis on putting translated text "between the lines") and often also included a separate full translation of the text rather than just using Ruby characters, which there is again there are exceptions.

Ruby annotation is also used in handwriting.

history

Hunmin Jeongeum Eonhae uses hanja (Chinese characters) and smaller hangul (Korean characters) as ruby, each in subscript to the right

In British typography, Ruby was originally the 5.5 point height font size that was used for interlinear versions in printed documents. In Japanese, the word furigana was used instead of referring to font size. When transliterating back into English, the word was rendered in some texts with “rubi” (the typical Romanization of the Japanese word ル ビ ). However, the spelling "Ruby" has become more common since a W3C recommendation for Ruby markup was published.

In the United States, at least before the 1950s, it was called "Agate":

" Agate : an old name for a type size slightly smaller than 5.5 points, .... Called Ruby in England . "

- Marjorie E. Skillin et al .: Words into Type (German: Words in Types), 1948, p. 538

Technical implementation

Displaying parallel text on a single line is a typographical problem that computers normally cannot adequately handle. Support is only available in word processing programs that specifically support Japanese, such as Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org. However, this is not on the typographical level of normal Japanese books. For HTML there is an extension in the CSS standard, which is, however, supported by very few browsers. For this reason, the pronunciation of the word is usually omitted on websites or only displayed in brackets after the word.

The representation of Zhuyin in Chinese next to the character is hardly possible without problems on the computer. Therefore, in this case, special fonts are used that have already integrated the Zhuyin characters.

Ruby in XHTML 1.1

In 2001, the W3C published the specifications for Ruby annotation to add Ruby markup to XHTML. Ruby markup is not a standard part of HTML 4.01 or any of the XHTML 1.0 specifications (XHTML-1.0-Strict, XHTML-1.0-Transitional, and XHTML-1.0-Frameset), but has been included in the XHTML 1.1 specification. The support of the markup language is not yet fully developed due to the slow implementation of XHTML 1.1 .

The Ruby markup consists of the elements ruby, rbc, rtc, rb, rtand rp. It is the only extension to HTML 4.0.

As a simple example, without using Far Eastern characters, a markup is used that represents a base and a line of Ruby text:

  <ruby>
    <rb>WWW</rb><rt>World Wide Web</rt>
  </ruby>

Output: WWWWorld wide web

As recommended by the W3C , this markup should be rendered as follows :

Browsers that do not support Ruby display the content without distinction, which can lead to errors in understanding, or at least looks unattractive. So the example mentioned would be output as "WWWWorld Wide Web". To partially solve this problem, there is a rptag, the content of which is not output by Ruby implementations. Due to the following markup, the display with browsers with Ruby support remains unchanged, browsers without however output "WWW (World Wide Web)", which eliminates possible misunderstandings:

  <ruby>
    <rb>WWW</rb><rp> (</rp><rt>World Wide Web</rt><rp>)</rp>
  </ruby>

Output: WWW (World wide web)

Usually the Ruby text is placed above the base, as well as in the vertical font - which is also only supported by some browsers - to the right of the base:

Notation	Should	Is
horizontal		東京(と う き ょ う)
vertical		漢字(か ん じ)

Ruby in CSS level 2

The W3C is also working on a specific Ruby module for CSS level 2.

This allows more complex markup with the grouping of elements in order to precisely assign their furigana to the individual characters, whereby furigana that are identical to the annotated characters are automatically suppressed (in the following example り ):

  <ruby>
    <rb>振</rb><rb>り</rb><rb>仮</rb><rb>名</rb>
    <rp>(</rp><rt>ふ</rt><rt>り</rt><rt>が</rt><rt>な</rt><rp>)</rp>
  </ruby>

Output: 振り仮名(ふりがな)

Browser support

Simple XHTML1.1 Ruby markup is supported by Internet Explorer (from version 5.0 for Windows and Macintosh ) and by WebKit browsers (from Chrome 5, Safari 5, Opera 15). Firefox from version 38 fully supports the CSS variant.

Unicode

Unicode supports Ruby annotations using special characters for interlinear annotation:

• U + FFF9: Interlinear annotation anchor to mark the beginning of the annotated text
• U + FFFA: Interlinear annotation separator to mark the end of the annotated text and the start of the Ruby annotation
• U + FFFB: Interlinear annotation terminator to mark the end of the Ruby annotation

However, the Unicode Consortium recommends using Ruby markup for better output.

ANSI

ECMA -48, also standardized as ISO / IEC 6429, defines escape sequences for using Ruby annotations for ANSI text terminals, even if this is hardly supported. The escape code PTX ( parallel texts ) has the following parameters:

• CSI 0 \(or short CSI \) to mark the end of the annotations
• CSI 1 \ to mark the beginning of the annotated text
• CSI 2 \ to mark the beginning of the Ruby annotation
• CSI 3 \ to mark the beginning of the Japanese Ruby annotation
• CSI 4 \ to mark the beginning of the Chinese Ruby annotation
• CSI 5 \ to mark the end of a Ruby annotation

See also

• Harakat - diacritical marks used in Arabic script for vocalization . (The Arabic script is a consonant script .)
• Nikud - diacritical marks used in the Hebrew script for vocalization. (The Hebrew script is a consonant script.)

Web links

• W3C specification Ruby Annotation (English) ( German translation )
• W3C test kit (English)
• Add-on for Mozilla Firefox browser to partially upgrade the missing support
• Add-on for Opera

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Marcin Sawicki, Michel Suignard, Masayasu Ishikawa, Martin Dürst, Tex Texin: Ruby Annotation . In: W3C Recommendation . World Wide Web Consortium . May 31, 2001. Retrieved February 14, 2007.
2. ↑ Elika J. Etemad, Koji Ishii: CSS Ruby Layout Module Level 1 . In: W3C Editor's Draft . World Wide Web Consortium . April 16, 2015. Retrieved May 5, 2015.
3. ↑ Can I use ... Support tables for HTML5, CSS3, etc. Retrieved on May 5, 2015 (English). 
4. ↑ Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages. 3.6 Interlinear Annotation Characters, U + FFF9-U + FFFB. In: unicode.org. January 24, 2013, accessed May 5, 2015 . 
5. ↑ Control Functions for Coded Character Sets. (PDF) In: Standard ECMA-48 Fifth Edition. ECMA International, June 1991, pp. 53-54 , accessed May 5, 2015 (English).