Writing kanbun texts

[Jacques JOLY]

Dear members,

Pardon me for that subsidiary question  : I am currently copying a text in kanbun , with the reten, ichiniten and the lot : is there somewhat ( some software or some list of terms, asa) enabling to do that ? especially the ichireten (re under ichi) I cannot find in the kotoeri list.

I would be very happy if someone could help me.

Jacques Joly

Jacques Joly

Maison Qixingzhai

31 Résidence Jeanne d'Arc

64270 Salies de Béarn

Tél. : 0559381220

Portable : 0627353692

[Paul S. Atkins]

Dear M. Joly,

Yes there is a block of Unicode called “Kanbun” that includes the linking mark, reten, and various other marks. 

Please see the following:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanbun_(Unicode_block)

Happy coding!

With warm regards,

—
Paul S. Atkins

Associate Professor,

Associate Chair, and TA Coordinator

Department of Asian Languages and Literature

University of Washington

Seattle, WA 98195-3521 USA

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[Richard Bowring]

A non-techy speaking. That’s all very well but how do you access them if you are using, for example, Word on a Mac? Do you have to download them from somewhere?

Richard Bowring

[Luke Roberts]

If you are using a Mac and you go to the Character Viewer, there should be a section called “kanbun” there with a little reiten by it.

Best, Luke Roberts

[Glynne Walley]

Useful info!  I never knew this.

FYI:  at least on my Mac, when you go into Character Viewer, you have to have the "View" option at the top of the window set to "all characters" to see the kanbun category.  Then scroll down to "East Asian Scripts."  If you have the "View" option set to "Japanese" the kanbun won't show up.

Glynne Walley
University of Oregon

[Richard Bowring]

Yes. I have just tried and found it. But on my Mac there is a small ‘cogwheel’ sign top left in Character View. Click, go to 'Customize list’ and it seems you can create your own list.

Richard Bowring

[Molly Des Jardin]

Dear Jacques and all,

If you go into Character Viewer on a Mac and click on the gear above the list of character types to choose from, you can pull up “Customize List.” From there, go to the list under “East Asian Scripts” and choose “Kanbun” to display on your Character Viewer palette. Then you can create favorites from there, at least. Does someone else know a more convenient way?

Molly C. Des Jardin, PhD
Japanese Studies Librarian
University of Pennsylvania
527 Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center
3420 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6206
Tel: 215-898-3205
Fax: 215-898-0559
moll...@upenn.edu

[Paul S. Atkins]

Yes, these characters can be copied and pasted from any web page that is displaying them as unicode (as opposed to graphics).  I sent out a link to the wikipedia article, but any search for “kanbun unicode” will produce others as well.

—

Paul S. Atkins

Associate Professor,

Associate Chair, and TA Coordinator

Department of Asian Languages and Literature

University of Washington

Seattle, WA 98195-3521 USA

[Jacques JOLY]

Dear members,

Thank you very much to you all. Nevertheless, the characters in the kanbun list can also be easily retrieved, copied and pasted from any Japanese keyboard : the problem that remains is that there seems to be no character for more complicated kaeriten like the ichireten, jôreten, kôreten, asa

All the best,

Jacques

[Nobumi Iyanaga]

Dear members,

You can use "superscript" and "subscript" styles for kanbun writing. For "ichi-re-ten", you can write "一レ" and set them as subscribed characters. In vertical writing, these characters will be displayed smaller than the normal text, and at the left side; for okurigana, you can use "superscript" style, displayed at the right side.

Otherwise, you can use also TeX (pLaTeX), with the kanbun style addition. This is much better, but not easy to install...
You may refer to this web page:
<http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/~n-iyanag/researchTools/rtf2taggedTextAndLaTeX.html>

Best regards,

Nobumi Iyanaga
Tokyo, Japan

[Tucker, John]

Jacques and everyone,

This might not be the best way, but it works. For okurigana, I insert a column to the right of the main column and then add the kana in a much smaller font. The grid shows the column.

For a vertical combination of ㆒ and ㆑ I add the symbols, of course, between the relevant characters, then change the formatting as is depicted in the screen shot below. First go to "Format," then "Font," then in "Spacing" condense the symbols (the extent to which they need to be condensed will depend on the font size used for them. I used an 8 pt font, condensed by 4 pts, and then for "Position" have the symbols "Lowered" by -- I used 6 pt. lower, but again this will depend on the other font sizes used. The lowering sends the symbols to the left. I insert ㆑, ㆒, ㆝, ㆚,㆖ etc directly into the main column rather than in another column to the left of the characters.

I have not figured out how to have the vertical ㆐and any additional punctuation such as ㆓ on the same line, as you can see in the line below. I hope this helps.

John A. Tucker, PhD | Professor of History and Director, Asian Studies Program | Department of History | Brewster A-317 | East Carolina University | Greenville, NC 27858 | 252.328.1028 | Tuck...@ecu.edu

________________________________________
From: pm...@googlegroups.com [pm...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Nobumi Iyanaga [n-iy...@nifty.com]
Sent: Friday, May 15, 2015 1:17 AM
To: pm...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [PMJS] Writing kanbun texts

[robin d. gill]

All this is fine -- but i wonder about a broader question: WHY DOES GOOGLE NOT ALLOW US TO MOVE THE CRAP THAT OCCUPIES HALF OF THE TINY VERTICAL SPACE WE ARE PERMITTED ON OUR LAPTOPS OVER TO THE SIDE SO WE DO NOT HAVE TO SPEND ALL OUR TIME ADJUSTING THIS OR THAT TO READ VERTICAL TEXT? DID THE JAPANESE MINISTRY OF CULTURE NEGLECT TO PUSH FOR VERTICAL TEXT? TRYING TO READ VERTICAL TEXT I FEEL LIKE I AM BEING DISCRIMINATED AGAINST BY THE HORIZONTALISTS WHO ASSUME THEIR'S IS THE ONLY ACCEPTABLE WAY TO READ. HAS NO ONE SUED GOOGLE ON THIS? IF NOT WHY CAN;T WE AT PMJS TAKE THEM TO COURT?

--

"Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!"

[Siva Kalyan]

Vertical text is part of the most recent HTML standard, but I’m not sure how widely it is supported.

Siva

On 19 May 2015, at 2:56 am, robin d. gill <robin...@gmail.com> wrote:

All this is fine -- but i wonder about a broader question: WHY DOES GOOGLE NOT ALLOW US TO MOVE THE CRAP THAT OCCUPIES HALF OF THE TINY VERTICAL SPACE WE ARE PERMITTED ON OUR LAPTOPS OVER TO THE SIDE SO WE DO NOT HAVE TO SPEND ALL OUR TIME ADJUSTING THIS OR THAT TO READ VERTICAL TEXT? DID THE JAPANESE MINISTRY OF CULTURE NEGLECT TO PUSH FOR VERTICAL TEXT? TRYING TO READ VERTICAL TEXT I FEEL LIKE I AM BEING DISCRIMINATED AGAINST BY THE HORIZONTALISTS WHO ASSUME THEIR'S IS THE ONLY ACCEPTABLE WAY TO READ. HAS NO ONE SUED GOOGLE ON THIS? IF NOT WHY CAN;T WE AT PMJS TAKE THEM TO COURT?

On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 9:48 AM, Tucker, John <TUCK...@ecu.edu> wrote:

Jacques and everyone,

This might not be the best way, but it works. For okurigana, I insert a column to the right of the main column and then add the kana in a much smaller font. The grid shows the column.

For a vertical combination of ㆒ and ㆑ I add the symbols, of course, between the relevant characters, then change the formatting as is depicted in the screen shot below. First go to "Format," then "Font," then in "Spacing" condense the symbols (the extent to which they need to be condensed will depend on the font size used for them. I used an 8 pt font, condensed by 4 pts, and then for "Position" have the symbols "Lowered" by -- I used 6 pt. lower, but again this will depend on the other font sizes used. The lowering sends the symbols to the left. I insert ㆑, ㆒, ㆝, ㆚,㆖ etc directly into the main column rather than in another column to the left of the characters.

I have not figured out how to have the vertical ㆐and any additional punctuation such as ㆓ on the same line, as you can see in the line below. I hope this helps.

<Screen Shot 2015-05-15 at 9.30.22 AM.png>

<Screen Shot 2015-05-15 at 9.26.19 AM.png>

[Chris Kern]

The writing-mode CSS property is theoretically supported by most of the browsers, but I don't know how good the support is (as usual Firefox lags behind; it only supports part of it, and still doesn't support the ruby/furigana tags in the HTML 5 standard)

[Lani Alden]

Former web developer (of 5 years) here who still keeps up with the latest web tech (with an obvious Japan focus!).

The support for ruby text is quite excellent, actually. The ruby tag is supported on the following versions:

Chrome 5.0 (released 2010-05-21)

Firefox 38 (released 2015-05-12)

Internet Explorer 5.0 (released 1999-03-18)

Safari 5.0 (released 2010-06-07)

Opera 15 (released 2013-07-02)

Vertical text (via writing-mode, -webkit-writing-mode, or -ms-writing-mode) is supported in the following:

Chrome 17 (released 2012-02-08)

Firefox 36 (released 2016-02-24) - (but you need to set layout.css.vertical-text.enabled to true via about:config)

Internet Explorer 9.0 (released 2011-03-14)

Safari 5.1 (released 2011-07-20)

Opera 15 (released 2013-07-02)

For displaying text to the left (via ruby-position)

Chrome - Unsupported

Firefox 38 (released 2015-05-12)

Internet Explorer - Unsupported (some basic support, theoretically, but I couldn't get it to work)

Safari - Unsupported

Opera - Unsupported

However, I've managed to get a working Kanbun demo for you. It's quite easy to use, in fact and has good compatibility. It should work on Opera, Chrome, Safari, Firefox (with vertical text enabled), and even newer versions of IE. But with Firefox and IE it doesn't look very nice.

Please take a look at it here: 

http://lanialden.com/kanbun

It would be trivial to make a tool that takes in some form of standardised kanbun markup (like the one aozora uses) and then pipes out this html code. Might be something to look into?

Thank you!

Lani Alden

MA Yale, May 2015.