[XeTeX] Japanese, Chinese, Korean support for Polyglossia

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

Hi,

> used in Taiwan. I am not aware of any phonetic guide text
> practices in Korea.

The Korean hangul script is already phonetic, so it does not need ruby. Kanji are used in Korea, but mostly to indicate place names and family names. 

The hangul script combines 1, 2, or 3 consonants and vowels into one character. "hangul" is written with 2 characters, one is h+a+n the other g+u+l. Given the rather large number of variations you can get by compounding 1, 2, or 3 sounds, the hangul script has 22.000 "characters". But it is easy to read, because each character is read top to bottom, and the stripes, dots etc have a unique phonetic value. So a computer needs to know 22000 characters, a human only the 40 or so different phonetic symbols that are compounded to form a "character".

Wilfred

> 
> - Mike
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