RE: [css3-writing-modes] A report from a meeting w/Japanese publishing group

Your understanding looks good.

First, you're right that some glyphs need to be rotated or replaced in vertical text flow. For replace-case, as Christoph pointed out, fonts are responsible for doing that. CSS can't be much help anyway.

So we're focusing on whether to rotate a glyph or not. This part is difficult because it's part of styles. Authors or editors usually define their own rules for their books for which glyphs should rotate and which upright.

Currently, the two (rotate and replace) are mixed, and handled in combination of fonts and algorithms in OS, so the orientation varies by OS and fonts. This makes authors hard to control orientation of each glyph of their contents, and we'd like to improve the situation. Having an interoperable glyph orientation was one of the feedback from Kadokawa.

Since it's a style, we let authors fine control using text-orientation property. But we still need a default orientation for each code point. We'd like UTR#50 defines it, and the whole discussion is which default value is the best.


Regards,
Koji

From: bradyduga@gmail.com [mailto:bradyduga@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Brady Duga
Sent: Sunday, January 15, 2012 12:42 AM
To: koba
Cc: MURATA Makoto; www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: [css3-writing-modes] A report from a meeting w/Japanese publishing group

If I can just restate the issues in a very simplified manner to see if I am correct in my understanding of the problem:

1. In a vertical text flow, some glyphs may need to be rendered differently then in a horizontal flow (rotated or replaced)
2. This cannot always be determined algorithmically
3. The writing modes module addresses this with styles to determine glyph orientation
4. Currently, glyph selection is a function of the underlying font engine (eg 'vert' gsub table in OpenType), not CSS (or Unicode)

Is item 4 the problem under discussion in the blog post? Is that the original issue Koji raised? I apologize if these are obvious questions, I am having a little difficulty following the discussion - the Google Translate page of the blog post was surprisingly good, but I think some of the important details were lost.

--Brady
On Sat, Jan 14, 2012 at 3:16 AM, koba <koba@antenna.co.jp<mailto:koba@antenna.co.jp>> wrote:
Murata-san

> In your blog, you argue against font-independent determination.
> I am interested in further discussions about this topic.
I am still making further review, and hope to make a post in Unicode
TR#50 forum, if it will be helpful.

Regards,

Tokushige Kobayashi

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