Re: Canadian aboriginal syllabics in vertical writing mode

On 1 May 2012 12:27, Michael Everson <everson_at_evertype.com> wrote:
> 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.unicode.org/reports/tr50/tr50-3.VerticalOrientation.txt> gives:

1400..167F ; S ; S ; S
1401..167F ; U ; S ; S

which seems to be a mistake.

>> 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.

In UTR#50 "S" means that the glyphs should be rotated 90 degrees
clockwise wrt the Unicode charts, and "U" means that the glyphs should
have the same orientation as in the code charts. The draft UTR#50
specifies that UCAS glyphs should be unrotated in "in those parts of
the world where characters are mostly upright" (whatever that means)
but rotated clockwise when "used for vertical lines in East Asia".
The big problem with UTR#50 as I see it is that it only deals with
glyph orientation, but with complex and joining scripts such as
Mongolian and Ogham it is runs of text that are rotated in different
orientations, not individual glyphs. In the two examples linked to
above the UCAS text appears to be rotated counterclockwise in vertical
layout, so that it reads bottom-to-top sideways, which is not a mode
of vertical layout that UTR#50 deals with.

Andrew
Received on Tue May 01 2012 - 07:19:34 CDT