Re: Hangul characters upright or sideways in vertical flow?

Hello Koji,

I have cc'ed Eric directly.

Our Korean experts on this list may have some more to say on this issue, 
but I'm extremely surprised at the idea of turning Korean Hangul 
sidewise in vertical flow.

I have a few books here about the history of Hangul, and of course when 
Hangul was invented, it was written each syllable standing upright in a 
vertical flow (i.e. same orientation as in horizontal flow). That's 
totally natural given that one of the design elements of Korean Hangul 
is that as in Chinese, each syllable fits in a square, and given that in 
most texts from the start until recently, Hanja (Kanji) and Hangul were 
mixed.

If you don't believe me, just search for images from Seoul and check out 
how Hangul is oriented on buildings when it's written vertically.

As for Yi, unless there is some material that clearly proves the 
contrary, definitely also make it upright in vertical flow. See e.g. 
http://www.babelstone.co.uk/Yi/script.html.

Regards,    Martin.

On 2011/10/05 8:19, Koji Ishii wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm sorry to ask you guys about vertical flow knowing it's not of much interests, but it'd be great if someone can help me to resolve an issue we have: whether Hangul characters should be rendered upright, or rotated sideways in vertical flow?
>
> I was thinking it should be rendered upright, and I believe MS Word does so, but there's a proposal to rotate them sideways:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Oct/0104.html
>
> I understand Korean doesn't use vertical flow these days. But this could also affect EPUB, where you may want to create old documents in EPUB or HTML format for e-book purposes. I'm also not sure Korean never use vertical flow, or still rarely use.
>
> Your opinions are greatly appreciated in advance.
>
>
> Regards,
> Koji
>
>

Received on Wednesday, 5 October 2011 00:30:31 UTC