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

From: Asmus Freytag <asmusf_at_ix.netcom.com>
Date: Thu, 03 May 2012 09:35:38 -0700

On 5/3/2012 5:50 AM, suzuki toshiya wrote:
> Thanks!
>
> Michael Everson wrote:
>> I am forwarding this query to my colleagues in Nunavut.

Well, it's an incomplete query and because of that, you will get an
incomplete result.

It may give an answer on what the preference would be in handling small
marks - under the assumption that characters were to be written upright.

But it would not give an answer to the underlying question, on whether
such upright rendering would be the default choice - whether in its own
script context, or whether in the context of inserting material (quotes)
in other writing systems that do use vertical layout and have a long
tradition of doing so.

Take a simple task like labeling the vertical axis in a plot.

Standard tools give you a choice there (for Latin) between stacked text
and rotated text.

SImple axis labels are done using stacked text relatively often, but the
minute you have something complicated, using perhaps superscript 2 for
some unit of area the stacked rendition runs into the same problem that
we've been discussing here (the 2 would end up on a line of its own) and
people then opt for rotated text.

Likewise, I suspect, that no matter how you arrange it, stacked
syllabics will look odd enough that the natural way to render longer
text that for some reasons have to go vertically, would be rotated.

But, unless you also ask that question, you'll get an incomplete answer.

A./

PS: and don't forget that even for Latin, the conventions are different
by location. East Asian usage will allow something like "square meters"
or °C to occupy a single cell in vertically laid out text whereas tools
written for Western users (e.g. Excel) generally do not support such
"mixed flow" usage (where inside some stacked "cell" a few characters
flow horizontally).
Received on Thu May 03 2012 - 11:41:01 CDT

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