Boten marks lack wide support

[r12a]

This issue is applicable to Japanese & Chinese, in particular.

Chinese and Japanese have a native way of indicating emphasis for short ranges of inline text which involves placing a small mark above or below the characters being emphasised in horizontal text, and to the right/left in vertical text.

The actual marks used vary, depending on author preference, although some marks are more common in vertical text and others in horizontal. Typically, dots, circles, or 'sesame seed' shapes are used.

The following illustrates this:

More:

• Japanese Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, & Latin orthography notes
• Chinese Han orthography notes

css-text-decor CSS has several properties for displaying emphasis marks, and colouring them, positioning them, etc.

The GAP

The tests below check for support of the most common shapes, and that the positioning can be managed. When this gap was initially raised, Chrome (and legacy Edge) did not support display of emphasis marks, but now all major browsers support them.

Tests & results:

i18n test suite, CSS3 Text decoration, emphasis marks

Action taken

Document the layout requirements for Chinese and Japanese.

Outcomes

Boten marks are now supported in all 3 major engines: Gecko, Blink, and Webkit.

[r12a]

The first comment in this issue contains text that will automatically appear in one or more gap-analysis documents as a subsection with the same title as this issue. Any edits made to that comment will be immediately available in the Editor's draft of the document. Proposals for changes or discussion of the content can be made by adding comments below this point.

Relevant gap analysis documents include:
Chinese • Japanese

[xfq]

Added links to clreq and jlreq.