From: Tom Gewecke (tom@bluesky.org)
Date: Sun Oct 13 2002 - 14:26:04 EDT
The latest Mac OS X upgrade has fonts that include the classic
Mongolian/Manchu range, 1800-18AF.
Displaying these scripts correctly seems to be loaded with problems: They
should run top-to-bottom and left-to-right, with ligatures and positional
variants similar to Arabic.
I assume that ligatures and positional variants would be handled by font
tables and rendering software operating on text encoded with the basic
codepoints. I'm wondering, however, how the directional questions of
display would be dealt with.
I gather that vertical display is for markup and not part of Unicode. I've
found what appears to be the appropriate stuff in the "writing-mode"
property of XSL and CSS3. Does anyone know of any browsers, Mac or Windows,
that support this?
I've also seen examples of the scripts written horizontally, both
left-to-right and right-to-left. Since the standard font glyphs have a
vertical orientation, they must be individually rotated minus or plus 90
degrees for displaying horizontally. Is this also purely a markup issue,
and are there any browsers that support it?
Thanks for the help! Any pointers to online or other information on this
topic would be appreciated.
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