RE: Display of Mongolian in Arabic or Hebrew documents

From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Tue Nov 27 2007 - 08:37:58 CST

  • Next message: Peter Constable: "RE: Display of Mongolian in Arabic or Hebrew documents"

    > From: vunzndi@vfemail.net [mailto:vunzndi@vfemail.net]

    > to answer the questions in a reverese order - Yes, if I was typing
    > Mongolian I would 'expect'(and if designing software for would have as
    > the objective) the Mongolian word to be vertical in the
    > search box and all of it to be visible...
    > one
    > simply has to increase the vertical spacing between a line containing
    > vertical Mongolian and the lines above and below.

    There's the rub: every existing piece of software that will use our text-drawing API will have menus and dialogs laid out with a particular line spacing already. Even in new applications, you'd be asking software developers to use tall line spacing in (say) English UI on the off chance that a user might have a Mongolian word in some user-created text that might appear in the UI. That's just not realistic.

    What you're asking for might be completely reasonable as a layout mode for a document authoring tool, such as a word processor. But implementing that at a low level text-drawing API is not realistic for reasons like the one described above. The word processor needs to apply higher-level layout behaviour to achieve that layout mode. It can even be the default layout mode *in that higher-level layout*; it just can't be the default for the lower-level API.

    > The text string itself is straight forward - the question then is one
    > of display. If in both cases, vertical text and horizontal text, the
    > words are not rotated rather it is the spaces between the words that
    > rotate.

    Think about this: in your horizontal mode, the Mongolian word flows perpendicular to the baseline. In vertical mode, it flows parallel to the baseline. In one or the other, the word is rotated. This has nothing to do with the space.

    Peter



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