RE: [css3-writing-modes] Latin scripts upright in vertical flow means...what?

Can I rephrase my question to ask about what English/Latin authors would expect to "upright" for ASCII characters?

The picture might also be misleading, so I edited that:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2012Jan/att-0015/text-orientation-upright-parenthesis.png

Which is "upright"?


Regards,
Koji

-----Original Message-----
From: Christoph Päper [mailto:christoph.paeper@crissov.de] 
Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 1:32 AM
To: www-style list
Subject: Re: [css3-writing-modes] Latin scripts upright in vertical flow means...what?

Koji Ishii:
>  writing-modes: vertical-rl;
>  text-orientation: upright;
> 
> Letters and numeric characters are easy, but how should parenthesis, hyphens, or colons look?
> 
> [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-archive/2012Jan/att-0011/text-orientation-upright-parenthesis.png

Without knowing too much about East-Asian typography, I would still assume that authors are more likely to apply 'upright' when they want to preserve the traditional em-square grid layout. Since the version on the right hand side of the image does not do that, I would count it as a third option. 

Where does the variant "do what the smart font wants to do, but only for paired characters like parentheses and oriented characters like arrows" go?

When you apply the above styleset to a span of roman-only text, i.e. no sinograms whatsoever, I would prefer smart parentheses in 1em tall blocks.

Does Unicode explicitly say something about U+FF08, FF09, (FF1C, FF1E), FF3B, FF3D, FF5B, FF5D, and U+FF5F, FF60, FF62, FF63, FFE9-C etc., i.e. about full-width parentheses and arrows? I'm now almost convinced that authors should use these when typesetting primarily sinograms, because they should follow Asian practice as if they were tetragrams themselves, whereas U+00__ should follow European, proportional habits.

Received on Tuesday, 17 January 2012 19:08:21 UTC