Re: Strawman proposal for UTR #50: Unicode Properties for Vertical Text Layout

On 10/3/2011 10:47 PM, Koji Ishii wrote:
> 7. CSS3 Writing Modes Appendix B: Bi-orientational Transformations[2] 
> defines Egyp, Hang, and Yi to be upright, while your proposal defines 
> sideways. I have no idea how they should be, which is correct?

Ideally, we would determine that by the preponderance of use in existing 
Japanese vertical texts. I don't think we are going to find much for 
Egyptian Hieroglyphs or Yi (the Chinese usage may inform us). I have not 
found anything for Hangul, although it's more likely to exist.

In the absence of such materials, I made the determination based on how 
those scripts are treated "natively", and because they behave more as 
the alphabetic systems than the ideographic systems, I handled them the 
same way as the alphabetic systems, i.e. sideways.

Egyptian hieroglyphs: the "native" use is a 2D layout. A linearization 
is already an approximation, and it was mostly done in alphabetic 
scripts, so horizontal.

Yi: apparently, there is essentially no tradition of vertical writing.

Hangul: It seems that in modern use, Hangul is written horizontally, 
with a Western-style typography (western punctuation, which is 
proportional, etc). Of course, there is occasional vertical writing, 
just like in English, but that's out of scope for UTR50. There was a 
tradition with an East-Asian style (vertical, etc), but the most recent 
evidence I have found is from the 1930s.

Eric.