RE: [css3-ruby] [css3-text] Position values and before/after definitions in LR vertical writing mode

It took a little long to investigate, sorry about that, as the student learning Mongolian word processor is not very good at Japanese, and I don't speak Mongolian at all. We tried English too, but Japanese worked better.

Probably, the correct answer does not exist, because we're trying to unify two different things. It's an invention and a matter of finding the most reasonable method. So any of us can be correct, but the question is which one works the best.

>From what he said, if we were to map right-side underline to either "before, "after", "under" or "over" in Mongolian, he said he would choose "after" or "over". "after" because "after" in line progression, and "over" because "over" the baseline. His word proves that the baseline should be rotated clockwise. So, "after" is still correct for the things that are affected by line progression, but "over" is correct for the things that are affected by baseline.

He also said he was thinking to call it "side" once before as Steve suggested. But it's not an option if we want to use single word for both horizontal and vertical text flow, and we need a unified word because some languages in Asia require switching the directions without breaking styles. I hope we're now on the same page about this.

What he said matches to what Alan said before:
> I agree with Koji's reasoning. What you state above with "vertical Classical
> Mongolian script is a lefthand rotation of a semitic RTL script rotation of a
> semitic RTL script" is wrong. So in turn, your assumption for the line-side
> which is on the right in vertical script being the underline is wrong.

> From what I can ascertain, at one time during it development, the inline
> progression was changed from running right to left (Map ttb and rtl to lth) to
> left to right (Map ttb and ltr to htl). I presume it was around the same time
> that the directionality of the language was rotated 90 degrees clockwise. I
> find upon investigation this development.

And to fantasai said:
> While the origins of Mongolian are from an RTL script, in Unicode it is an LTR
> script, essentially rotated 180deg from its historical origins.

I guess our researches and discussions were very helpful to make this table a reasonable conclusion:

          | before | after | under | over
----------+--------+-------+-------+-----
Japanese  | right  | left  | left  | right
Chinese   | right  | left  | left  | right
Mongolian | left   | right | left  | right

This result supports fantasai's original mail about the need to distinguish between "before/after" and "over/under".


Regards,
Koji

Received on Friday, 22 October 2010 04:53:52 UTC