Text Directionality Workgroup
Contents
Text Directionality Workgroup
This page will summarize the evolving work of the Text Directionality Workgroup, tasked by the TEI Council with developing a new section for the Guidelines on recommendations for encoding a variety of textual features related to text directionality and orientation. The related SourceForge ticket is http://purl.org/tei/fr/3475007.
Workgroup Members
- Martin Holmes (TEI Council)
- Deborah W. Anderson (Unicode Consortium)
- Robert Whalen (Northern Michigan University)
- Marcus Bingenheimer (Temple University)
- Stella Dee (King's College, London)
Order of Tasks
- Enumerate textual features to be covered
- Collate existing standards and recommendations and relate them to features
- Identify any gaps which might require new TEI elements or attributes
- Outline the new section
- Write the first draft for consideration by Council
- Identify other places in the Guidelines where information or links need to be included
Mailing List
The group has a mailing list provided through Brown University at http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A0=TEI-DIR-WG.
Examples of primary sources and constructed illustrations
This section collects together some examples of primary sources which our discussion can reference. We aim to collect useful examples of some straightforward cases, but also of some edge cases which our proposal must be able to handle. Some of these may be used as examples in a final draft of the new section of the Guidelines. These are listed in no particular order.
- Easter Wings is a good example of rotation rather than text directionality.
- Rotation along X axis:
- Rotation along Y axis:
- Rotation along Z axis:
Notes from initial discussions
- We agree (so far) that we would like to distinguish between two distinct types of phenomena: "true" text directionality (such as that found in language such as Japanese written vertically ttb with lines sequence rtl -- and "rotational" features, in which text written in any direction is rotated or written along a path. Our proposal will have to cover both of these phenomena, and provide for cases in which they interact, but they will probably be handled by different mechanisms.
- We agree that the ITS specification is rather a red herring. Its primary concern is translation rather than text representation, and its provisions for directionality are sparse.
- We agree that the CSS Writing Modes draft provides the best descriptive introduction to directional phenomena.
Useful documents
- Unicode Properties for Horizontal and Vertical Text Layout
- Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (to be revised soon, in the light of TR50 above)
- proposed review of TR9
- what you need to know about the bidi algorithm and inline markup
- Unicode controls vs markup for bidi support
- CSS Writing Modes
- CSS vs Markup in XHTML
