From: Andrew West (andrewcwest@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Nov 22 2007 - 03:50:51 CST
On 22/11/2007, John Hudson <john@tiro.ca> wrote:
>
> It seems to rub some people the wrong
> way that the glyphs for a vertical script are not vertical, but perhaps they are
> encountering text in applications that fail to display the text runs rotated, and hence
> are seeing it as horizontal and blaming the font.
I've had the same complaints (or expressions of surprise) with regard
to my Phags-pa fonts. People see that the glyphs have a vertical
orientation in the Unicode code charts, but when they try to display
Phags-pa characters in isolation (e.g. as part of a table of Phags-pa
characters on a web page) the characters are rotated counterclockwise
(wrt their code charts orientation), which appears wrong to them. It
is not easy to explain that this is actually correct behaviour, and
that they need to rotate the text using a higher level protocol (e.g.
css) in order to get the expected orientation (and unfortunately the
ability to rotate text using css varies from browser to browser, so
there is no guarantee that the end user will ever see vertically
orientated Mongolian or Phags-pa).
I think that it is normally only people who are not very familiar with
Mongolian or Phags-pa who are concerned by this issue (they have fixed
expectations that the characters produced by the font should look the
same as the characters in the code charts), but, in my experience, the
user community does not have any problems with a rotated horizontal
mechanism for dealing with vertical scripts.
Andrew
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