Re: SI units (was: Expressing fractions)

From: Lee Sau Dan (danlee_at_informatik.uni-freiburg.de)
Date: 01/10/05 

Date: 11 Jan 2005 01:11:38 +0800

>>>>> "Jordan" == Jordan Abel <jmabel@purdue.edu> writes:

    Jordan> ["Followup-To:" header set to alt.usage.english.]
    Jordan> On 2005-01-10, Lee Sau Dan <danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
>> Of course, we use European-Arabic numbers and Latin letters for
>> the numbers and units in _technical_ documents to achieve that
>> purpose. But what do you expect in a novel? Bumps and lurps
>> of a foreign script here and there, or a purely native script
>> for the language being used? (Local newspapers do refrain from
>> using Latin letters. This is partly because they're set
>> vertically, making the Latin-scripted words difficult to read
>> and recognize.

    Jordan> Japanese fonts, on the other hand, seem to have a _lot_ of
    Jordan> SI units set in square cells so that they run with the
    Jordan> text

Yeah. So do fonts for the big5 encoding (for traditional Chinese
characters).

    Jordan> - I would assume [but don't know] that vertical text
    Jordan> would use these

No. Most fonts you see are designed for horizontal text. (For
Japanese, check what the little <ya>, <yu>, <yo> and <tsu> look like.
If they look like subscripted (i.e. shifted down), then it's for
horizontal text. For vertical writing, these should be shifted
right.)

Most computer software for both Japanese and Chinese display text
horizontally, in the same direction as the Latin script. However,
when it comes to printing, many software are armed with "vertical
versions" of fonts, which is nothing but normal fonts with each
character rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise. The text-processing
software need to do no extra work. They just need to use these
vertical fonts and the printout will be vertically set -- when you
rotate the printout 90 degrees clockwise. (But some punctuations,
such as a dash or the parenthesis, should not be rotated for vertical
printout. So, they have the same appearance in both the vertical and
normal versions of a font.)

    Jordan> But, then, Japanese text tends not to be shy about using
    Jordan> european/arabic numerals and latin letters in general,
    Jordan> which you've indicated isn't the case for chinese.

No. I think it's the same case.

What I said was that in technical writings, we are more open to using
the Western numerals and SI unit symbols. I have no experience with
Japanese technical writings. So, can't comment on them. But doing
this in Chinese has the advantage of making it easy to locate such
quantities in running text. :)

For non-technical text, we are as shy as the Japanese in the use of
Latin letters and Western numerals. Both because many people are not
familiar with Western languages, and because they look strange in the
matrix of Chinese characters. (To make them look a bit neater, Latin
letters in such texts are usually set with fixed-width fonts rather
than proportional fonts. The width is the same as a Chinese
characters, or half of that. So, it appears to align a bit neater
with the rest of the text.) 

-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     §õ¦u´°                          ~{@nJX6X~}
E-mail: danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee

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