From: jcowan@reutershealth.com
Date: Fri May 14 2004 - 10:43:53 CDT
Andrew C. West scripsit:
> > A page that contained both Mongolian and vertical CJK might require
> > a vertical bidirectional algorithm, but AFAIK that question has not
> > yet arisen.
>
> I'm a little confused by the last sentence.
So was I.
> In bilingual Manchu-Chinese texts, which were common during
> the Manchu Qing dynasty [1644-1911], the text normally follows the Manchu page
> layout, with vertical lines of Manchu and Chinese interleaved from left to right
> across the page, so that from a Chinese perspective the book reads backwards.
Most interesting. What about codex binding? When I see people reading
Chinese newspapers on the subway, the binding appears to be on the left
even though the columns of the text are RTL; at least, judging by what
appears to be the front page.
(ObJoke: A reporter for the New York Yiddish newspaper, the _Forvits_:
"Chief? Shpeisel here. I've got a story that'll rip this town wide open.
Hold the back page!")
> As I suggested in a recent thread on mixed horizontal/vertical layout, if you
> did have mixed Top-To-Bottom (TTB) and Bottom-To-Top (BTT) scripts such as
> Mongolian and Ogham [...] then you
> could deal with their conflicting directionality as if they were rotated LTR and
> RTL scripts by means of LRO, RLO and PDF control codes [202C..202D].
Surely that's not enough: you'd need to implement the full implicit bidi
algorithm, giving Ogham a nonce bidi type of R. Either that, or run the
Ogham T2B instead of the normal direction.
-- Long-short-short, long-short-short / Dactyls in dimeter, Verse form with choriambs / (Masculine rhyme): jcowan@reutershealth.com One sentence (two stanzas) / Hexasyllabically http://www.reutershealth.com Challenges poets who / Don't have the time. --robison who's at texas dot net
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