Archaic ruby-like punctuation marks

The goal

Consider the following passage (John 3:16) from the CUV version of the Bible:

神愛世人,甚至將他的獨生子賜給他們,叫一切信他的,不至滅亡,反得永生。

In the actual Bible it is actually typeset like this:


的、



亡、



生。
 



人、











們、



Note that the commas (、) and full stops (。) are typeset on the side, on the preceding ideogram’s lower-right side, as if they were ruby.

As far as I know, achieving this with the current crop of typesetting software is absolutely impossible.

Notes on the example

The ruby-like characteristic of this archaic placement of punctuation marks is no coincidence, as this is a very natural way to add punctuation to already-typeset text that previously had no punctuation. In a very real sense, they are ruby.

On an unrelated note, in this example you can also see the use of the Chinese honorific full-width space (挪抬) at the upper-right-hand corner. Strangely, this archaic-but-still-current typographic convention (it is still used in very formal letters, including handwritten ones) seems to be unknown in the West, and seems to be never mentioned by English-language descriptions of CJK typography.

Additional note

Both the CUV (Common Union Version) and, to a lesser extent, the SB (Studium Biblicum) versions of the Bible contain interesting standard (both archaic and current) typography which cannot be handled by Adobe’s typesetting software. For example, trying to typeset the Chinese proper name and citation marks (which look like straight and wavy underlines), especially if you want to mimic their actual use in these two bibles, would result in desperation. IMHO, it would be worthwhile for Adobe to help gauge their support of CJK typesetting by trying to typeset these two archaic-looking-but-very-common books.

(On a brighter note, the CUV also uses warichu (extremely rare in modern Chinese typography) and the Chinese pilcrow (thin sans-serif circle), which, while archaic, can be handled by Adobe’s software.)

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