Ruby character

Alternatively, sometimes foreign words (usually English) are printed with furigana to provide the meaning, and vice versa.

Xiao'erjing is a Perso-Arabic alphabet, adopted by Hui Muslims and at times utilized as ruby characters in various manuscripts.

This is because usually such manuscripts include Arabic texts such as the Quran, and the Chinese writing is the explanation or translation.

Books with phonetic guides (especially pinyin) are popular with children and foreigners learning Chinese.

Here is an example of the Korean ruby characters for Korea ("韓國"): Romaja is normally used in foreign textbooks until Hangul is introduced.

[clarification needed][1] In Chinese, the practice of providing phonetic cues via ruby is rare, but does occur systematically in grade-school level text books or dictionaries.

[2] Sometimes interlinear glosses are visually similar to ruby, appearing above or below the main text in smaller type.

However, this is a distinct practice used for helping students of a foreign language by giving glosses for the words in a text, as opposed to the pronunciation of lesser-known characters.

In British typography, ruby was originally the name for type with a height of 5.5 points, which printers used for interlinear annotations in printed documents.

Web browsers either render it with the correct size and positioning as shown in the table-based examples above, or use the fallback rendering with the ruby characters in parentheses: Note that Chinese ruby text would normally be displayed in vertical columns to the right of each character.

Unicode Technical Report #20[8] clarifies that these characters are not intended to be exposed to users of markup languages and software applications.