Re: FYI: Vertical reading mode in the Vivaldi browser

Hum, that's interesting because we were told explicitly to not do that
in Readium 2 (horizontal/vertical writing switch). 

Mind you, I'm no expert in Japanese typography, I just documented how we
must implement vertical writing, based on:  

  * The International text layout and typography index
(https://w3c.github.io/typography/);
  * The EBPAJ guide (http://ebpaj.jp/counsel/guide)
  * The Japanese text layout requirements (https://www.w3.org/TR/jlreq/)
  * Insights and feedbacks from publishers, with Florian Rivoal as our
direct contact.

So I know characters and typesetting change depending on the
writing-mode, that it's super tricky to switch from one to another if
you don't have heuristics or support for alternate stylesheets
(http://www.idpf.org/epub/altss-tags/) and we deemed we shouldn't offer
such a setting as long as we don't support alternate stylesheets (which
is kinda clear when you take a look at the EBPAJ guide BTW). 

Out of interest, I did a quick test on this page :
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/日本語  

And results were not necessarily great, especially with the sans-serif
font.  

Some characters like "[" and  "]" in headings are not rotated, same for
latin characters, etc.  

It's a little bit better with the serif font 

but I'll let experts decide if this sample is acceptable or not,
considering the original page is using an horizontal writing-mode.  

As for pagination, we have a huge issue right now in EPUB with vertical
writing: there's nothing in CSS multicol, CSS overflow, etc. to deal
with it. I raised this issue through a compat issue to the spec editors
(https://github.com/rachelandrew/multicol-wip/issues/5) but is also
primarily means this is something for which we'll have to dedicate
efforts.  

Best,  

Jiminy 

Le 03.02.2018 13:16, Ivan Herman a écrit :

> Just as a point of interest:
> 
> https://vivaldi.com/blog/vertical-reader-why-it-matters/
> 
> ----
> Ivan Herman, W3C
> Publishing@W3C Technical Lead
> Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
> mobile: +31-641044153
> ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704