Adaptation of Journal Article Tag Suite XML for Japanese humanities papers

Abstract

Out of East Asian languages which do not use the Latin alphabet, Japanese is a very complicated writing system that uses “kanji,” which are ideograms, and “kana,” which are phonetic characters. Most of the Japanese papers published so far using Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) are science, technology, and medicine fields adapting horizontal writing systems, which are structurally consistent with English papers. Most of them only replace Latin letters with Japanese characters. In this presentation, we suggested method of presenting vertically oriented Japanese humanities articles in JATS XML. For vertical description of Chinese numeric, we would like to propose the introduction of an element which specifies description direction. Alternatively, could be used as a hidden command when creating a document. We propose the following notation in the part of the number that can be converted: 六五. Chinese numeric 六五 is a Arabic numeric 65. With this, it is shown that 六五 of Chinese numerals can be converted to 65 in Arabic numerals. For vertical text description with JATS, we would like to suggest adding @ writing-mode as an attribute to :. Furthermore, note and references should be differentiated for example, between a and a in the future. As Kanji are ideograms, there are variations that cannot be expressed with UTF-8. If these difficult Kanji are included in the JATS text, it will be necessary to decide on their description method. For the propagation of use of JATS XML for non-Latin characters articles, the structure of the document for example, vertical description, and special presentation should be considered more widely.

Keywords

• Japanese language
• Journal Article Tag Suite
• Humanities
• Vertical writing
• XML