* Stefan Persson <alsjebegrijptwatikbedoel@yahoo.se> [2001-12-26 00:02]:
> Is there some way to indicate vertical writing (in columns from right to
> left) for Japanese and Chinese? Is there a Unicode code point assigned for
> this, a HTML command, or just a special option in some word processors?
Well, some word processors and typesetting systems do support vertical
writing. It's probably more common in software oriented towards
Chinese and Japanese, but I can't help you there. I do know that
the Omega typesetting system supports vertical writing. Omega is
based on TeX but with many extensions and some changes, and uses
Unicode as its internal text encoding.
Unicode doesn't have some way to indicate vertical writing. I think the
only consideration for it is vertical presentation forms of some
characters. Anything more is left for other software layers to deal
with.
As for HTML, I don't know (I'm sure someone will fill us in) but even if
some mechanism for vertical writing is defined, I don't think any
current browser supports it. By the way, does any browser in common use
support the Ruby extensions to HTML?
While doing a web search for the word "tategaki", looking for its
meaning, I found a Java program that formats Japanese text for vertical
display using HTML tables with a cell for each character. It's here:
http://homepage.mac.com/kkonaka/TategakiProg.html
This is kind of a kludge, but it may be useful in some circumstances.
The author warns though:
> (this generates far many cells in a table commonly observed in normal
> web pages). - many browser cannot display text layout this way of more
> than a few pages... (they'd run out of memory).
-- Αλέξανδρος Διαμαντίδης * adia@egnatia.ee.auth.gr
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