Re: Display of Mongolian in Arabic or Hebrew documents

From: Andrew West (andrewcwest@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Nov 27 2007 - 09:14:08 CST

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    > From: vunzndi@vfemail.net [mailto:vunzndi@vfemail.net]
    >
    > ... Whislt there are some examples of horizontal runs of Mongolian in
    > Chinese text, horizontal is not the norm. The norm is for words to be
    > vertical even though the sentances maybe be horzontal...

    I'm not sure that this is the case. In my experience, in academic
    books and journals, horizontal embedding is most common. Of course, in
    special situations, such as on banknotes, postage stamps and for
    company logos, care may be taken to display Mongolian text in its
    natural vertical orientation, but I don't think that you can really
    compare a banknote design with computer text.

    In Prof. Choijinzhab's book on Mongolian Encoding, Menguwen Bianma
    蒙古文编码, he mixes horizontal and vertical embedding, with individual
    letters and short words orientated vertically, and long words
    orientated horizontally, as can be seen from this example:

    <http://www.babelstone.co.uk/MGWBM/MGWBM_C106-C107.jpg>

    Clearly, a decision has been made only to embed Mongolian text
    vertically if it is short enough to fit in without expanding the
    horizontal line spacing, which I think is a reasonable typographic
    decision to make.

    The important thing to realise is that we can already achieve vertical
    embedding (or mixed vertical and horizontal embedding) of Mongolian
    words in horizontal Latin or Chinese text using rich text (e.g. CSS),
    As an example I have just typed out a short extract from the above
    page from Prof. Choijinzhab's book, showing both horizontal and
    vertical Mongolian embedded in horizontal Chinese, and formatted it as
    an HTML document. When rendered by Internet Explorer (under XP) with
    the Mongolian Baiti font (see attached "RichText.jpg") it looks
    perfectly OK to me, and I truely do not know what the fuss is all
    about.

    The fact that in a plain text editor Mongolian text is always laid out
    horizontally (see attached "PlainText.jpg") does not bother me in the
    slightest, and I agree wholeheartedly with Peter that the
    disadvantages of having vertical Mongolian layout in a horizontal
    plain text context far outweight any perceived advantages.

    Andrew

    RichText.jpg

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