RE: Hangul characters upright or sideways in vertical flow?

Hi. Martin and Koji.
Thanks a lot for raising this issue. I believe this is really important to the Korea.

Concerning to the sideways rotation in vertical flow, I think Martin's answer is perfectly right.
Even recently vertical flow does not be used, this style is still one of the design elements of Korean Hangul. And this should be kept consisting for historical books and data.
Therefore I think turning Korean Hangul sidewise in vertical flow does not make sense.

But I am not an expert of historical area, so I would like to discuss and get more opinions from HTML5 Korean interest group.

Best regards,
Wonsuk.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-html-ig-ko-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-ig-ko-
> request@w3.org] On Behalf Of "Martin J. Durst"
> Sent: Wednesday, October 05, 2011 9:30 AM
> To: Koji Ishii
> Cc: public-html-ig-ko@w3.org; public-i18n-cjk@w3.org; Eric Muller
> Subject: 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 01:06:24 UTC