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

hi Martin,

On 13/02/2019 10:57, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
> 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.


There's a discussion related to this at 
https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/2754 which points to or shows 
examples of text that is multiline, but written RTL.  See also the 
article at https://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/right-to-left.html which talks 
about Meiji era explorations related to inline character direction.

If you look at old japanese postage stamps, the text tends to be written 
on a curved path, which also feels to me at least unlike single 
character columns.


>>      ... 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.

My main concern is that i keep hearing from people who are suggesting 
that RTL chinese and japanese should be authored in HTML by using 
writing-modes and limiting the column height to one character.  Apart 
from the fact that that is like trying to crack an egg with a hammer, it 
doesn't actually work for the multiline text i mentioned above.

People may or may not think of certain items of horizontal RTL text as 
single character columns, but i don't think that's a good way to author 
the text.

hth clarify a little the (probably too) brief minutes.

ri

Received on Wednesday, 13 February 2019 13:57:23 UTC