A whole new spin on the term 'Vertical markets' (aka in SiaO we trust?)

Looking at life a bit more vertically, for a moment...

Sorting it all Out — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 14:19:27 GMT

The question Craig asked me last December was clear enough: When will Windows support a vertical layout

Silverlight as Esau: selling its implementation for a pot of interface

Sorting it all Out — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:02:22 GMT

Apologies for the biblical metaphor in the title... Now I mentioned last week in Shine a Little [Silver]Light

Thirdly, aka Forty two, aka Understanding the answer can require a properly defined question

Sorting it all Out — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:33:21 GMT

Continuing on with the third of all point from A whole new spin on the term 'Vertical markets' (aka in

re: A whole new spin on the term 'Vertical markets' (aka in SiaO we trust?)

John Cowan — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 20:42:44 GMT

It's true that some neutral punctuation marks take on the orientation of their context, just as they take on the bidirectionality of their context. Some extra logic would be needed for that.

It's also true that as a stylistic matter, sometimes LTR glyphs (Latin, mostly) are left unrotated in Chinese or Japanese vertical contexts. But it's always correct not to do so, I think, so it's basically a style issue, not a "bare legibility" issue.

re: A whole new spin on the term 'Vertical markets' (aka in SiaO we trust?)

Bruce Rusk — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 01:13:50 GMT

John's remarks don't seem entirely accurate to me: there are some typographical conventions surrounding punctuation in CJK text that complicate the situation. The vertical orientation of certain punctuation marks does not change (e.g., ! ? ; :), while that of quotation marks does (the common pairs are 〈〉《》「」; parentheses are in the same category). Even more complicated is the handling of Roman text in CJK: it can sometimes be rotated, sometimes not.

Word gets the handling of vertical text right, though only in certain fonts does everything come out properly. In any case, the algorithm would have to be a little more complex.

re: A whole new spin on the term 'Vertical markets' (aka in SiaO we trust?)

John Cowan — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 23:49:47 GMT

Looked at de novo, vertical text involves only two fairly simple considerations for each character: is it strongly TTB or vertically neutral, and does it have fixed or variable orientation. "Strongly TTB" is analogous to the strong L and R letters in the bidi algorithm, and means that the characters appear TTB even in a context where BTT is the main direction (as on the spine of an English-language book), implying the use of the bidi algorithm for vertical characters. Vertically neutral characters will go either TTB (if the overall text progression is rightwards) or BTT (if the overall text progression is leftwards).

"Fixed orientation" means that the glyph is never rotated no matter what the direction of text progression. "Variable orientation" means that when the glyph is presented out of its normal orientation, it is rotated to follow the alien baseline.

CJK characters (hanzi, kana, hangeul, etc.) are both strongly TTB and fixed orientation; Mongolian is strongly TTB but variable orientation. All other characters are vertically neutral and variable orientation. (The Unicode book implies that Ogham letters are strongly BTT, but I believe that to be an error.)

If you know these things, and the Unicode bidi values, all you have to do is set the overall direction of text progression (downward-horizontal, rightward-vertical, or leftward-vertical) and everything will play out algorithmically.