addruby.el

Nihongo ha koko (In Japanese)

• What is this function?
  • This function is a helper function to add ruby/yomigana/furigana.
• What is ruby/yomigana/furigana?
  • A Japanese phonetic system.
• Why did you make this?

  When I tell the how to read a Chinese character in Japan, then I use Japanese phonetic characters for explanation. This program help to input such explanation.

  • Further background of character system.

    There are two main kind of character systems.

    1. Phenogram
    2. Ideogram

    Phenogram is like Latin characters (Europian), Hangul characters (Korean), and Kana (Japanese). This characters represent how to read the characters.

    On the other hand, there is Ideogram. The characters represent means, and how to read is depends on era, place, and so on. Chinese characters are one of them.

    Therefore when you see a Chinese character, you know what it means, but, you sometimes do not know how to pronounce it. You can read (understand) by heart, but you can not read (pronounce) it. It is like Arabic number. For example: `1'. This is pronounced: English `one', Deutsch `eins', Japanese `ichi/hii', Korean `iru/hana' and so on. Many of people understand this number, but pronunciation is depends on language. This is the meaning of ``you can understand, but can not read.''

    Historically, most of characters starts with Ideogram, like a picture. I think the reason is the concept of ``symbol of sounds'' is a more abstract.

• Examples.
  • If you want to add how to read in yur text, like 1/2 -> 1/2(half), mark this `1/2' and call addruby-add-ruby-replace-command function. You only need to input how to read, rest of the same strings are `query-replace'd.
  • You can set up with addruby-*-text as follows. This is easy way to add TeX ruby command.

      (setq addruby-prefix-from-text "\\ruby{")
      (setq addruby-postfix-from-text "}")
      (setq addruby-prefix-to-text "{")
      (setq addruby-postfix-to-text "}")
    	  

    1/2 is replaced with (ex.) \ruby{1/2}{one over two}