Re: Sideways-left is not without uses

I don't think these examples show the need for sideways-left. All of them can be done with "writing-mode: sideways-lr".

Removing the ability to do what you're showing would certainly be an issue, but the resolution was not to just remove sideways left. It was to remove sideways-left AND introduce the sideways-lr and sideways-rl values to the writing-mode property. In terms of the previous properties and values, here is what they mean:

writing-mode:sideways-lr => writing-mode:vertical-lr;text-orientation:sideways-left
writing-mode:sideways-rl => writing-mode:vertical-rl;text-orientation:sideways-right

In both of these writing modes, the text-orientation property is ignored as glyph & baseline orientation is considered inherent to the writing mode (just like they are in the horizontal-tb writing mode).

What we have removed is:
a - the ability to use sideways-left together with with vertical-rl
b - the ability to change between sideways-left and another orientation inline.

The primary use case for these was the ability to have downwards Arabic (or Persian, or Hebrew, or Urdu...) in vertical Japanese (or Chinese, or Korean...), but this is a theoretical use case, not attested in the wild, despite searching for it.

The examples you show here do not need either of these ability, so they are still all supported. And arguably, they are easier to achieve for authors, since they can now do the only with the writing-mode property, while they previously needed to use the text-orientation property in addition.

 - Florian

> On 24 Sep 2015, at 14:20, Stephen Zilles <szilles@adobe.com> wrote:
> 
> The discussion (and Resolution) on “Sideways” today seemed to imply that there was no “good” use for “Sideways-left” (beyond Mongolian). I think that is not the case as the attached examples show. These are taken from the fashion magazine Elle and a catalog for SteinMart, but there are likely other sources  that use the same layout. What is interesting about the two Elle examples is that in one the sideway-left captions are top (right) aligned and in the other they are bottom (left) aligned.  The SteinMart example fills the available space to alignment is not an issue. Do we really want to bias everything to Sideways-right? It seems that Sideways-left (or sideways-reverse) will inevitably come into use. Note that if you have “sideways” tabs on the edge of your page, they are “sideway-right” if they are on the righthand side of the page, buta are “sideways-left” if they are on the lefthand side of the page.  (I could not find an example in my files, but I know I have seen it.)
>  
> Steve Z
> <English-BtoT-onLeft-TopAlignt-1999-ElleFashionTrends-2.jpg><English-BtoT-onRigh-BotAlignt-1999-ElleFashionTrends-1.jpg><English-BtoT-onRight-2007-09-SteinMart.jpg>

Received on Thursday, 24 September 2015 06:37:36 UTC