Talk:Ruby character

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[edit] Katakana for Tokyo

Though it serves as an example of one kind of ruby usage, I wonder if the katakana ruby for Tokyo is a practical example. Since the word Tokyo is not a foreign word, katakana is inappropriate. Since I don't know too much Japanese, I am curious to know the answer. Any taker? Kowloonese 03:20, 4 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Sometimes, furigana for kun-yomi is written in hiragana, while furigana for on-yomi is written in katakana. — Gwalla | Talk 18:30, 12 Aug 2004 (UTC)
So are you saying the opposite is ture? Since Tokyo is on-yomi, it should not be using hiragana in the Ruby. i.e. one of the two examples is bad practice. Kowloonese 18:38, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
No, neither is bad practice. They just have different uses. --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 20:37, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Firefox support?

The ruby characters showed up in my version of Mozilla Foxfire v.0.9.2 for MS Windows, so the support must have been added. gK 15:34, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Can someone confirm this please? Chameleon 15:45, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)
I have the most recent version of Firefox (1.0). I deleted the Koan plug-in in order to see if Firefox could handle the Ruby by itself, and it couldn't. I'm going to have to reinstall Koan now. Chameleon 22:21, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia complex ruby support

The article says that Wikipedia doesn't support complex ruby. How can this be? AFAIK, Wikipedia supports (i.e. doesn't interfere with) any and all legitimate HTML constructs. Why should there be a difference here? --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 20:38, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It really can't. See it yourself:

<rbc> 10 31 2002 </rbc> <rtc> Month Day Year </rtc> <rtc> Expiration Date </rtc>

--minghong 08:38, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Weird. I did some testing in the Sandbox and found that apparently Wikipedia doesn't recognize that <r(b|t)c> is legitimate markup, so it converts the < > to &lt; &gt; -- which of course kills the tag. I suppose we can expect this to be fixed in a future release from MediaWiki... --Marnen Laibow-Koser (talk) 15:11, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)

[edit] ruby in Chinese

the ruby thing is entirely a Japanese thing. In Chinese texts, one only see it in grade-school materials or dictionaries. The many places implies its use in Chinese really should be taken out.

Xah Lee 11:12, 2005 Mar 1 (UTC)

Ruby is a useful tool for teaching Chinese. — Chameleon 19:22, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It is used elsewhere in Chinese. In Buddhist texts, as a pronunciation aid (and through an entire book of mine), for example. Especially Taiwan, as you might expect.Apeman 03:30, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Ruby markup on Wikipedia

There is a template to facilitate the use of ruby markup on Wikipedia.

Input: {{Ruby|这|zhè}} {{Ruby|是|shì}} {{Ruby|一|yì}} {{Ruby|些|xiē}} {{Ruby|汉|hàn}} {{Ruby|字|zì}}。

You'll see: 这(zhè) 是(shì) 一(yì) 些(xiē) 汉(hàn) 字(zì)。

In addition, links to Wiktionary definitions are automatically added to each Han character. To make the text legible, the font size is a little larger than usual. This template is therefore not for in-line text.

If larger characters are necessary, then input: {{Ruby-big|梦|mèng}}

You'll see: 梦(mèng)

Put {{Ruby_notice}} on any pages with ruby text. — Chameleon 19:22, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Very interesting! However, it is coded to produce text for Chinese renderings only, and it uses explicit font selection rather than just giving the browser cues via HTML "lang" attributes, which I think would be the better way to go about it. I would rather see something more versatile before adding info about the templates to the article. — mjb 21:29, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
漢(かん) 字(じ)。
Seems to work fine for Japanese to me. — Chameleon 21:40, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It is my understanding that some East Asian readers are very sensitive to font selection, and do not like to see Chinese text rendered in a Japanese font, or vice-versa. Unicode does not distinguish between 京 and 京, but they are often "seen" as Japanese and Chinese, respectively (the two glyphs should appear slightly different here). Often the differences are subtle, but a hook or tail here, an pointed stroke there, were (and still are) points of contention in the Han unification process.
I would rather see an optional argument to specify the language code (ja, zh, ko, etc.). For example, {{Ruby|&#20140;|kyō|ja}} would produce something like <ruby lang="ja"><rb>[[Wiktionary:京]]</rb><rt>kyō</rt></ruby>. Explicitly specifying fonts should not be necessary. — mjb 00:41, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Template:Ruby currently specifies a font for the transcription (because Pinyin tone marks don't work in all fonts) but no font is specified for the Han character. It is left for the browser to decide automatically. — Chameleon 01:02, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
OK, I've made a Japanese version: {{Furi}}. {{Ruby}} can now be just for Chinese. — Chameleon 01:16, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I think language-specific templates like that are probably ideal. As for what they should contain, font-wise, perhaps we should solicit opinions from people who have contributed to other articles such as Han unification and Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Japan-related articles)… I suspect there will have to be some compromises between doing "what's right" and "what works." — mjb 01:41, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I think the choice of names for the templates Furi and Ruby are not good. Furigana can be done in romaji, hiragana or katagana. Chinese annotation can be done in pinyin or bopomofo, their font requirement may be different too. Probably the Ruby template should be left as generic while each kind of ruby usage requires a different template for better font control. Kowloonese 02:13, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)

The words "Ruby" and "Furi" don't refer to the fact that the annotation is romaji, hiragana, katakana, pinyin or bopomofo. "Furi" just refers to the Japanese word for such annotations; "Ruby" just refers to a non-Japanese word for such annotations. The only difference at the moment between the templates is the language tags. — Chameleon 10:55, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Add Chinese chars

Give kanji and hanzi for Japanese and Chinese terms.

"Zhuyin is not as easy to read when presented horizontally.": Say why. Substantiate your claims.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 210.201.31.246 (talk • contribs).

Moved from Talk:Ruby characters -- ran (talk) 22:24, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Agate?

I took out this sentence from the first paragraph:

At one time, ruby was called "agate" in the United States.

as this is referring to ruby the typeface, not ruby the 'small, annotative characters that can be placed above or to the side of a character when writing logographic languages such as Chinese or Japanese to show the pronunciation'. If you are unaware that rubi characters are ultimately named after an annotative typeface for English, then this is really confusing as it jumps from one meaning to another. The typeface is talked about further down in the History section. — Moogsi 20:36, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Tho if you think the typeface deserves a better place in the article then please put it back in the first paragraph. But distinguishing it from the Japanese meaning, cos I had to go to Agate and back to know it was referring to a font. — Moogsi 20:47, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Four-character idiom

The Ruby notation on Four-character idiom seems to be working incorrectly. Can someone take a look? Shawnc 01:30, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

The examples sections look fine to me. IE6/Win32 renders them nicely. Firefox 1.5.0.4/Win32 doesn't support ruby markup, so it "falls back" to parenthesized text as expected (since HTML renderers are supposed to ignore tags they don't recognize). What were you observing that was incorrect? —mjb 07:51, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] furigana

What's the difference between ruby characters and furigana? —Tamfang 19:46, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

This question is answered in the articles.

  • ruby = small typographic annotations adjacent to the main text.
  • furigana = ruby as used in Japanese writing, usually to provide a phonetic spelling for kanji that might be unfamiliar to the reader (because the reader is very young, or the kanji is very obscure). It is one of the more common uses of ruby, but not the only one.

—mjb 07:46, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ruby Usage In Japanese Generally Frowned Upon On Wikipedia?

Well, at least according to WP:MOS-JA → "Do not use the tag to further annotate the kanji, as many browsers cannot display it properly, and it does not degrade gracefully." Evidently that's a codified guideline among Japanese Wiki-editors, and it was subsequently cited in an ongoing discussion/dispute as a reason for me to remove said helpful and clarifying hiragana ruby tags from a mangaka's name in kanji on a Wikipedia article. What does everyone here think; agree or disagree?

 – Bakemono 04:51, 01 July 2006 (UTC)

It is posible to have acceptable output in all navigators by using the the following CSS code (should be added as default in wikipedia CSS imho):

   ruby{
   display:inline-table;
   text-align:center;
   white-space:nowrap;}
   ruby>rb{display:table-row-group;}
   ruby>rt{display:table-header-group;font-size:40%;}
   ruby>rp{display:none;}

on navigators with proper CSS support (like firefox), it would display with furigana on top, and parenthesis won't show; with navigators without proper CSS support (like konqueror) it will show on the same line, with the parenthesis. with MS-IE it works fine too (but I don't know if because of the CSS or the ruby support; well, doesn't matter), with the exception that the ruby text is not centered.

Srtxg 13:49, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

The use of the word "mangaka" certainly shows your affinity for using Japanese words in place of equivalent English ones, so your desire to uphold the usage of Japanese text is understandable by extension. Have you considered the potential that writing a name fully in kanji then with its furigana in following parentheses would be easier to look up in a search, instead of splitting up the furigana in markup? Do what's better for text searching, and you know which method to use. You should just use ruby on outside websites.--75.18.163.141 08:11, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] XHTML Markup

Is it possible to code basic ruby so that it doesn't show up at all when the browser lacks support? I'm trying to write a document with ruby support, but I would rather not have all of the parentheses appearing for users without ruby support. Anybody know? (This is not related to Wikipedia!) freshofftheufoΓΛĿЌ 11:59, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Not a language lesson

I understand that this is not a language lesson, but the example of 愛 (love) is important. We should not focus on writing in an in-universe style, and the information informs people who are not familiar with the subject. If we need to shorten the example, can we merge the information with another section in this article or add it to a different article and then a relevant lead–in and wikilink, for the reader to lean more? Taric25 19:02, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

The examples are there to be brief illustrations of the info given in the intro. They show the 2 most common situations: pronunciation guides in Japanese and Chinese -- certainly not the only uses of ruby, but that's clear from the text, which says these are usual/typical applications. The intro plus those examples are all someone needs to come away with an understanding of what ruby is. More detailed info and, if we want, further examples about how ruby is used belongs in the Uses of ruby section, which the reader can look at if they want to learn about those relatively esoteric details. Your 愛 (love) example falls into that category.
However, I don't think the text around that example is written well, and it doesn't really belong. The point is to explain what ruby is, not what it could be or what it is not. Yet you have speculation (a big no-no in Wikipedia) -- an example of how ruby could be used and why people "theoretically" might want to use it that way, and you try to explain, in argumentative terms, why that situation is unlikely. That's a waste of the reader's time, and the detail about man'yōgana is going off on a further tangent that isn't relevant to ruby at all.
If it were to stay, which I feel it really shouldn't, then you need to rewrite it. Ditch the "first of all", "second of all", and "thus"; those should've been clues that you're not writing in an informative style, but rather you're trying to make a logical argument / trying to persuade the reader. Don't make a statement that you set out to contradict with "but this isn't always the case" or argue against, because then it's unclear what your point really is. And if you find that you're writing in such a way that the reader has to get all the way to the end before you've made your point, then you need to start over. The paragraph should begin with the conclusion / the point being made, then continue with an explanation. —mjb 03:51, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Graphs in Text Boxes Incorrect

I'd fix it myself if I knew how, but in the boxes with the characters in the section near the top, the "tō" of "Tokyo" and the "ai" character are wrong in all cases--unless it's my browser or something, but I think not. Can anyone fix that?Apeman 03:35, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

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