Re: Styling vertical text, initial article and interactive tests

On Tue, 2015-05-26 at 13:08 -0400, Elizabeth J. Pyatt wrote:

[...]

> There is little evidence I am aware of that Irish monks ever used 
> Ogham in a horizontal fashion in other types of documents.
> Examples of Ogham I have seen written horizontally are explanations 
> of the Ogham symbols, not actual writing in Ogham. I’m sure it was 
> and has been convenient to write Ogham horizontally, but it’s also 
> been convenient to write the CJK scripts horizontally in digital 
> documents.

A minor note - a trip to a newsagent in Tokyo, or a look through a 
hotel lobby, quickly elicited lots of magazines in which one half is 
set in vertical Japanese text and the other half horizontal, with 
pages numbered from (1) at each outside cover and working towards the 
middle.

I'm mostly saying this because I've heard several people recently say 
that Japanese is always written vertically outside of the digital 
world and, whether or not that was always true, it's certainly not 
true today, and one could read your sentence as implying that.

A trip to Orkney did not any elicit magazines written in Ogham, 
unfortunately :-)

For sure it's true, though, that embedded text will generally have to 
be forced to the prevailing direction, except in the case of concrete 
poetry or art. Questions such as where the underline goes if you have 
an English word inside an Arabic phrase set vertically in Chinese do 
come up in practice, e.g. in Malaysia.

Best,

Liam


-- 
Liam R. E. Quin <liam@w3.org>
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
The barefoot typographer

Received on Tuesday, 26 May 2015 19:00:31 UTC