Re: [minutes] Internationalization telecon 2019-02-07

Hello Richard, others,

On 2019/02/08 00:37, r12a wrote:
> https://www.w3.org/2019/02/07-i18n-minutes.html


>     richard: actually vertical text with 1 character per column is
>     really an urban myth

I'm not sure about this. When you see 門生羅 (and not 羅生門, as it would be 
with LTR) at the top of a gate, the easiest way to explain why the 
characters are placed the way they are is that whoever wanted to write 
them was used to writing vertical lines (i.e. columns), with the columns 
going from right to left, but only was able to fit one character per 
'line' (i.e. column).

Of course, this was done rather implicitly and without calling each 
character a column. And we cannot go back to the people who wrote the 
name of a door on the top of a door in ancient times, but it's the best 
explanation we have so far. If you have a better one, I'd like to hear 
about it.

>     ... it's nonsensical

It may be nonsensical (or not) as an approach to how to format it with 
CSS. It may also not apply to more 'modern' Chinese examples, in 
particular from Taiwan, where I think multiple-line RTL headings can 
also appear.

Regards,   Martin.

>     ... horizontal-tbrl was suggested
>     ... but that is inconsistent with writing modes
>     ... key issue is that japanese/chinese are strongly LTR
>     ... UBA relies on character properties
>     ... thinking is to use bidi override with direction=rtl
>     ... embedded numbers/text in <bdo>
>     ... but very similar to "close wrapping" recommendation we do
>     for normal bidi text

Received on Wednesday, 13 February 2019 10:57:33 UTC