Chinese Hanyu Pinyin's tone marks

fulio pen

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Jul 18, 2012, 7:13:34 PM7/18/12

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Hello,

My questions are in the following web page:

http://www.pinyinology.com/toneMarks/tones/marks2.html

thanks for help.

fulio pen

Gene Wirchenko

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Jul 18, 2012, 9:14:27 PM7/18/12

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1. how to remove the dot at the top of letter 'i'?

Do not. Select the appropriate character instead.

2. what is the code for the first tone which is a macron?

I do not know, but I found all tones for all vowels in the Times
New Roman font when I prepared a Word document with Pinyin in it.

3. all the tone marks on the letter 'a' is higher those on the other
letters. Is this normal? Or is there a better way to present them?

I have never noticed this. The characters I found looked fine to
me.

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Jukka K. Korpela

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Jul 19, 2012, 1:23:41 AM7/19/12

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2012-07-19 4:14, Gene Wirchenko wrote:

>> http://www.pinyinology.com/toneMarks/tones/marks2.html
[...]

> 1. how to remove the dot at the top of letter 'i'?
>
> Do not. Select the appropriate character instead.

There is the letter dotless i, U+0131, used in Turkic languages. But
when normal i is combined with a diacritic mark, the dot is to be
removed by the rendering software. If this does not happen, the
rendering software does not handle combining diacritic marks properly
and probably misplaces marks.

It is generally better to use precomposed characters, such as �, when
available, than combining diacritic marks. The latter requires much more
advanced rendering software, and even programs that can deal with it may
produce typographically poor results. But you need to make your best to
ensure that the fonts suggested all contain all of the characters
needed, see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/characters.html

> 2. what is the code for the first tone which is a macron?

It's U+0304 COMBINING MACRON, hence it can be written İ in HTML.

> I do not know, but I found all tones for all vowels in the Times
> New Roman font when I prepared a Word document with Pinyin in it.

I suppose you mean using precomposed characters. Times New Roman, at
least in newest version, seems to contain all pinyin letters with
diacritics as precomposed, and Times New Roman is fairly universally
available, so you can just use

font-family: ..., "Times New Roman";

in CSS, with ... replaced by your favorite font list, after checking out
that they too have all those characters.

> 3. all the tone marks on the letter 'a' is higher those on the other
> letters. Is this normal? Or is there a better way to present them?
>
> I have never noticed this. The characters I found looked fine to
> me.

It looks odd indeed. I suppose the OP uses a browser with some special
font as the default. This probably explains the problem with the dot in
i; normally no such problem appears, but it may occur when using
combining diacritic marks so that the primary font does not contain all
of them - forcing browsers to combine a combining mark from one font
with a base letter from another font, which may result in a mess.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Jukka K. Korpela

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Jul 19, 2012, 7:47:51 AM7/19/12

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2012-07-19 8:23, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

> It's U+0304 COMBINING MACRON, hence it can be written İ in HTML.

Oops, ̄ of course.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

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Nov 2, 2012, 6:16:24 PM11/2/12

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Dear Sirs:

I want to thank everyone for your help. Now the error has been corrected. Running on the validater again, there was no error, and the page becomes normal. I am very happy. Thanks again.

fulio pen

fulio pen

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Nov 4, 2012, 5:00:19 PM11/4/12

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Dear Sirs:

Thanks a lot for your help. Following is the new page.
I know it is not working on some browsers. But I need to manipulate the tone marks somehow, and can only put the tone code separately behind the letter.

http://www.pinyinology.com/toneMarks/tones/marks2b.html

Thanks again.
fulio pen