Re: Canadian aboriginal syllabics in vertical writing mode

On 1 May 2012, at 11:16, suzuki toshiya wrote:

> In current draft of UTR#50, the properties for Canadian aboriginal syllabics
> are defined as "U; S; S;". But seeing the PDFs like
> http://www.gov.nu.ca/save10/English/Documents/Newsletters/Newsletter%203/Newsletter%203%20-%20Inuktitut.pdf
> http://www.cley.gov.nu.ca/pdf/Documentary%20Art%20Project_Inuk.pdf
> it is questionable if the default value "U" is preferred.

I don't know what "U" means, but that rotation is weird and confusing and not legible. In a cross-word, vertical text goes from to to bottom with no rotation.

> I cannot exclude the possibility that this rotated text is forced by the
> limitation of printing software, but, the tuning of the positions for
> the small glyphs for glottal stop and final sounds (U+141C - U+142A,
> U+14D0 - U+14D2, etc etc) should be discussed if "U" is preferred value.

You are GUESSING. Don't guess, please.

You cannot rotate Canadian Syllabics because when you do the letter-values change. The two examples you have shown are examples of extremely bad typographic choices.

> Does anybody have "manually written" Canadian aboriginal syllabics in vertical writing mode?

Crosswords go from top to bottom with no rotation

J
U
S
T

L
I
L
E

L
A
T
I
N

That is the only thing that is immediately still legible in Syllabics.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
Received on Tue May 01 2012 - 06:29:46 CDT