- From: Stephen Deach <sdeach@adobe.com>
- Date: Thu, 18 Aug 2005 16:37:01 -0700
- To: fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>, Stephen Deach <sdeach@adobe.com>
- Cc: Martin Duerst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>, Ognyan Kulev <ogi@fmi.uni-sofia.bg>, Tex Texin <tex@xencraft.com>, Addison Phillips <addison.phillips@quest.com>, www-international@w3.org, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>, Bert Bos <bert@w3.org>
Mongolian was originally written as RL-TB in an Aramaic-derivative script.
Then the whole page was rotated 90-deg CCW (glyphs and layout are simply
rotated from the original form). This is essentially its current vertical
writing form TB-LR.
-- Now comes the wierd part. Small snippets of horizontal text are now
written LTR with glyphs inverted 180-degrees from the original form.
So yes, it is currently laid out LTR, but it is really written as if it was
RTL-inverted.
At 2005.08.16-04:35(-0400), fantasai wrote:
>Stephen Deach wrote:
>>I would like to see your list of languages using RTL scripts.
>>The only scripts identified as RTL in Unicode are Arabic and Hebrew.
>>(Then there is the strange case of Mongolian which is marked as LTR but I
>>think should be treated as "RTL rotated to read top-down".)
>
>Mongolian is LTR because when it goes horizontal for brief spans, it is
>usually LTR. (Probably because most scripts out there are LTR.) Longer
>texts are always laid out vertically, in which case Mongolian has the
>same directionality behavior as CJK.
>
>~fantasai
---Steve Deach
sdeach@adobe.com
Received on Friday, 19 August 2005 00:11:41 UTC