Re: [unicode] Re: Canadian aboriginal syllabics in vertical writing mode

Thanks to everybody commented about the effect of the rotation
for Canadian syllabics. Yet I've not understood fully about
how small superscriptic characters are drawn (or expected to be
drawn) in vertical writing mode.

I attached a picture. In my understanding, when "aamuu" is written
in vertical writing mode, the positions of the black dots of "aa"
and "muu" would not be changed. If this is already misunderstanding,
please let me know (and discard following question).

In next, when "atim" is written in vertical writing mode, how "m"
would be positioned? What I was guessing in my first post was (d).
Some posts say that Canadian aboriginal syllabics in the vertical
writing mode may induce unused spaces in the string (and the result
will look strange or difficult to read), so the expected position
would be one of the (a), (b), (c)? And, after the "m", some space
should be inserted?

Regards,
mpsuzuki

Bill Poser wrote:
> In the case of the Carrier syllabics, I have never seen an example of
> vertical text so there is no native usage to go by. However, as others have
> said, rotated text is very difficult to read because of the role of
> orientation. It's true that the small characters provide evidence as to the
> direction of writing, but it is still quite difficult to read rotated text.
> Unrotated text, on the other hand, is easy enough to read but looks strange
> because of the large amount of unused space in cells containing small
> characters.
>
> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 2:07 PM, Asmus Freytag <asmusf_at_ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't understand what the ruckus is about.
>>
>> Looking at the samples, simple observation yields two points:
>>
>> a) the little superscript letters give an immediate and powerful "guide to
>> the eye". There simply is no way you can be confused as to the writing
>> direction of a text snippet (as apposed to isolated letters). Anybody who
>> is fluent in this script will read "word shapes" as you would do in Latin,
>> not "letters". There are apparently so many superscripts that they
>> completely compensate for the issue of symmetric shapes for the base
>> letters.
>>
>> b) The same superscripted letters would seem to make it exceedingly
>> awkward to write texts in vertical mode with upright glyphs. They give all
>> appearance of forming logical clusters or variable length. Those are better
>> accommodated in vertical flow by rotating the line as a whole (hence
>> rotating the glyphs).
>>
>> c) Even if the superscripts don't form graphical or clusters with adjacent
>> characters, the fact is that they take so much less space. This makes it
>> awkward in vertical "character at a time" mode, because many cells would be
>> near-empty.
>>
>> The example of Latin was given, but I think it's misapplied. In most
>> languages, Latin characters do not form strong clusters, and where they do,
>> that might be limited to certain type styles. Dutch IJ is sometimes written
>> as a "unit" in signage that uses upright glyphs for vertical text. Fraktur
>> "ck" clusters strongly enough to not acquire intercharacter spacing in
>> justification (I've not seen any vertical + upright samples of Fraktur).
>> But these types of letter clusters are the exception. For the Syllabics,
>> clustering seems to rather be the rule.
>>
>> Certainly, if you wanted to cite syllabics in vertically set East Asian
>> text there would be no doubt that you'd want to rotate such text.
>>
>> A./
>>
>>
>