#342 New section on encoding text directionality
The ticket arises out of this discussion on TEI-L:
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind1201&L=TEI-L&T=0&F=&S=&P=10478
The Guidelines currently have little or no information on how to encode directionality of text (both horizontally and vertically). The implicit recommendation is to use the W3C's Internationalization Tag Set:
which would involve using e.g. @its:dir="rtl" for right-to-left. There is an example showing how to build a TEI schema in the Exemplars:
http://tei.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tei/trunk/P5/Exemplars/
ITS, however, doesn't handle vertical text layout (as in Japanese, for instance).
The proposal is to add a new section to Languages and Character Sets (CH) that covers:
- Inherent directionality in Unicode codepoints
- Unicode embedding and override codepoints for directionality
- Desirability of making directionality explicit in encoding (ref http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-bidi-css-markup\)
- Recommended use of ITS, and explanation of how to create a schema incorporating it
- Possible approaches to vertical orientation using CSS (http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-writing-modes/)
- Differentiation between vertical orientation as common in Japanese text and rotated blocks, which can be handled with tei:zone/@rotate.
Seems like a good idea to me, but needs input from specialists to draft a new section
Should we form a working group to propose a draft of this section? I volunteer to join said group, as this is an issue I've had some interest in. Martin, who else would you invite to such a group?
I would be really reluctant to see us duplicate the work of others.
I suggest that as much of this as possible be done in a non-normative manner, illustrating how TEI can work with these standards rather than extending TEI to cover this ground.
Reassigning to Martin Holmes from Stuart Yeates, so we keep track of this. I agree that this needs looking at and that we should gather people who know more about it to suggest standards to adopt/recommend.
For the record, Council decided in Oxford that MH would consult such people as D. Anderson, F. Sasaki and M. Bingenheimer, along with the TEI-L list, to put together a group to create a recommendation for a new Guidelines section on encoding text directionality. The workgroup now has a wiki page: http://wiki.tei-c.org/index.php/Text_Directionality_Workgroup .
Just an update: work is proceeding on this, and is being tracked on the wiki page. We are moving slowly because we're waiting for the final version of http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr50/, and the next release of Unicode, before drafting our Guidelines section, which will refer to both. In the meantime, we may proceed with a section on text rotation, which we intend to distinguish from true text directionality.
Presentation made to TEI Council in Providence in April 2013, and a subsequent message summarizing the state of play sent to both the working group and the Council list:
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/pipermail/tei-council/2013/017756.html
Changed this ticket to Amber, because although it's a long way from ready, we have reached the stage where a first draft is ready to be discussed by Council.
Council decided during the January telco that MH and LB will move forward with integrating the draft into a rewritten Chapter 10, incorporating sections from other chapters as discussed at the November face-to-face, this work to begin one week after the release of 2.6.0 in January.
I've now added all the images (with permissions in zip files per TCW20) from the draft to the P5/Images folder in SVN (rev 12830).
Re-reading the discussion from November:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F0pOZ5PkWvIfnPgAKCONRdrDZhl4dkig_zqCiPvUG8A/edit#heading=h.ta41hmu1pneh
I see that what we intended was a rewrite of Chapter 5, Non-standard Characters and Glyphs (WD), which will include both the new draft section and what is now 10.6.6 ("Languages and Writing Systems").
Rewrite completed, new section in Guidelines for next release, and Council has signed off on it. Closing this ticket with thanks to everyone who helped.