From: Andrew C. West (andrewcwest@alumni.princeton.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 25 2004 - 08:07:48 EST
On Thu, 25 Mar 2004 03:36:29 -0800, Peter Kirk wrote:
>
> What about a cell phone or PDA for use in China. Some users may prefer
> vertical display of text, but then the system needs to know what to do
> with Latin etc text embedded in the Chinese. Isn't that a credible
> scenario? Or are the Chinese to be forced to read their language
> horizontally on all electronic devices?
The whole point is that you cannot sensibly mix vertically formatted text and
horizontally formatted text in the same line (except for the case of very short
words). When Mongolian text is embedded in Latin, Cyrillic or horizontal Chinese
it is rotated 90 degrees so that it reads LTR instead of vertically; and when
Latin or Cyrillic text is embedded in vertical Mongolian or vertical Chinese
text the alphabetic script is normally rotated 90 degrees so that it reads TTB
instead of LTR. There is absolutely no need for directional formatting controls
in these situations.
The only potential need for vertical formatting controls would be if you were
embedding a chunk of Bottom-To-Top text within text that was oriented
Top-To-Bottom (or vice versa), but that scenario is extremely unlikely, and even
if it did occur you could simply use the horizontal formatting controls (LRO,
RLO, PDF, etc.) - treating TTB as LTR and BTT as RTL - and use a higher level
protocol to rotate the whole thing 90 degrees.
Andrew
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