Re: Fullwidth/upright vertical characters in Mongolian

Apart from those common punctuations, I'd say it's more of stylish
typographical choices (or, actually more often, lack of conscious
choices and — "whatever you get from the font") to let non-CJKM
characters sit sideways or upright.

It's challenging even in vertical CJK text to typeset upright digits
and western letters, if the combination of the text engine and the
font doesn't provide upright glyphs directly (under certain attempts
of using upright glyphs, say, inputting fullwidth-ASCII or other
fullwidth/CJK characters). It's also problematic for the author or
typesetter to decide what kinds of numbers should be set upright and
what be sideways.

It's even harder when typesetting Mongolian because of the lack of
reliable text engines and fonts. Therefore quite often you can only
see what the text engine and the font provided, instead of what the
author/typesetter intended to set.

For example, in http://www.mongolfont.com/mn/computer/history.html the
circled digits being sideways is probably just a side effect of
`text-orientation: sideways-right;` which was actually intended to
make sure Mongolian glyphs are placed sideways, but these circled
digits were not isolated.

An example of upright circled digits being used (here they're not only
counter of the endnotes, but also references in the body text, while I
guess smaller/superscript/subscript circled digits would've been a
better choice but might not have been easy for the author to typeset):

Attachment: "640-2.jpeg" from http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/nM81gZFII3yFnDBiDDLYGw
梁海 Liang Hai


On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 5:17 AM, 梁海 <lianghai@gmail.com> wrote:
> An example of parenthesis as well as quotation, question, and
> exclamation marks in Mongolian text:
> "attachment 640.jpeg" in a web page from China's national radio
> station, CNR: http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/iEl3xBZswc_Zq8tn8hR_yA
>
> I'd say, fullwidth characters of aforementioned punctuation marks are
> used in Mongolian text, but it's important to understand that it's
> because of Chinese fonts and input methods' influence, lack of
> standard, and certain technical workarounds:
>
> - For question and exclamation marks that are expected upright, using
> fullwidth characters is the most straightforward way to ensure that
> without being restricted by a certain font. (Although it's still quite
> problematic because Chinese fonts in the mainland China have their "！"
> anf "？" aligned to the ride right in vertical text.)
>
> - For parenthesis and quotation marks, there isn't a widely agreed
> convention that which characters should be used and whether their
> glyphs should be white-space-padded to 1 em like CJK punctuations.
> Therefore, both ASCII "()" and fullwidth "（）" parenthesis characters
> can be seen being used, and both "«»" and "《》" (although this pair is
> not really ASCII vs fullwidth-ASCII) (and even PUA characters) are
> seen for quotation marks.
> 梁海 Liang Hai
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 4:27 AM, Liang Hai <lianghai@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Yeah, Chinese fonts produced in the mainland China are usually required by
>> the national standards to support a certain set of basic Cyrillic letters,
>> and their glyphs are usually drawn in the same style (1 em wide,
>> non-proportional) of fullwidth Latin ones for certain reasons, although
>> their Unicode characters are not "fullwidth".
>>
>> 梁海 Liang Hai
>>
>> On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 4:22 AM, Badral S. <badral@bolorsoft.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Richard,
>> Sorry for the confusion. I thought all CJK fonts, because every CJK font
>> seems to contain fullwith cyrillic, which appears indeed ugly. If you
>> meant the unicode range U+FF00-U+FF60, then certainly dosn't exist such
>> cyrillic characters.
>>
>> Badral
>>
>> On 23.01.2017 20:42, r12a wrote:
>>> On 19/01/2017 18:22, r12a wrote:
>>>> see https://w3c.github.io/i18n-drafts/articles/vertical-text.en#upright
>>>> for more context.
>>>
>>> Greg, Jirimutu, Badral,
>>>
>>> Thanks for your responses! Let me try to synthesise what i heard
>>> here, to check whether i understood correctly, and ask some follow-on
>>> questions. (It would be great if you have examples to hand that you
>>> could scan and send, btw.)
>>>
>>> ARE FULLWIDTH LATIN CHARACTERS USED IN MONGOLIAN?
>>>
>>> Greg has seen full-width punctuation characters. (It would be great if
>>> you could give me some examples of what kinds of punctuation
>>> characters.) I'm assuming that it wouldn't include the fullwidth
>>> commas and periods you see in Chinese text but perhaps it includes
>>> question marks? Parentheses and brackets?
>>>
>>> Jirimutu mentioned what i understood to be counters for lists – is
>>> that correct? If so, that's interesting, since i was going to ask
>>> about that specific case.
>>>
>>> Badral mentioned that he'd seen full-width Latin + Cyrillic
>>> characters. The addition of cyrillic here is interesting because there
>>> are no fullwidth cyrillic characters in Unicode afaik. Is a font
>>> applied to achieve that effect?
>>>
>>>
>>> IS IT COMMON TO HAVE 'UPRIGHT' NON-CJKM CHARACTERS IN MONGOLIAN?
>>>
>>> I should have probably already mentioned that i expect Han characters
>>> to be upright in vertical Mongolian text, and that this is produced by
>>> default when using CSS styling. UTR#50 [1] describes the vo property,
>>> which indicates which characters appear upright by default, and which
>>> are rotated (and in some cases transformed).
>>>
>>> I'm hearing, however, that there are occasions where Latin text, and
>>> characters such as digits may appear upright, although by default they
>>> run down the page on their side.
>>>
>>> Jirimutu also mentioned characters such as circled digits, which it
>>> seems logical to see upright.
>>> http://www.mongolfont.com/mn/computer/history.html shows circled
>>> digits for list counters, but there is CSS styling to make them
>>> display on their side, rather than appear upright (which would be the
>>> default for those characters). So that suggests to me that content
>>> authors may want these list counters may appear sideways, rather than
>>> upright (which is their natural default according to Unicode properties).
>>>
>>> I guess i should probably have asked whether fullwidth characters
>>> always stand upright, or whether they can also run down the page on
>>> their side.
>>>
>>> cheers,
>>> ri
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> [1] http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr50/
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Badral Sanlig, Software architect
>> www.bolorsoft.com | www.badral.net
>> Bolorsoft LLC, Selbe Khotkhon 40/4 D2, District 11, Ulaanbaatar
>>
>>