- From: fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>
- Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2010 07:15:10 -0700
- To: "www-style@w3.org" <www-style@w3.org>, 'WWW International' <www-international@w3.org>
In top-to-bottom horizontal writing mode (English, most other scripts) and in right-to-left vertical writing mode (CJK), the "before" side and the effective top of the line (wrt vertical alignment, glyph rotation, etc) coincide. See http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/discuss/vertical-text/diagrams/text-flow-vectors-tb.png http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/discuss/vertical-text/diagrams/text-flow-vectors-rl.png But in left-to-right vertical writing mode (Mongolian), the "before" side and the effective top of the line do not coincide. See the illustration here: http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/discuss/vertical-text/diagrams/mongolian-vectors.jpg The "before" side of a line is to the left. The "top" (ascender) side of a line is to the right. If ruby-position and text-underline-position use "before" to mean "on the right side of the line" in vertical text, then we have a problem where "before" means different sides of an item depending on what property is involved. Either the definitions should be updated to depend on whether the block flow is right-to-left or left-to-right, or the keywords should be changed to something else to avoid a conflict in meaning. I suggest the latter, since I suspect that the current definitions are the ones that are typographically relevant. However, I haven't encountered any really good pairs of keywords. (Koji and I are using "above" and "below" for now.) Richard, do you have any thoughts on this? ~fantasai
Received on Sunday, 26 September 2010 14:15:47 UTC