A Peek at Vertical Text
For whatever reasons (mostly intertia, I would imagine), the languages which are most associated with vertical text, Chinese and Japanese, are written horizontally on the web.
But vertical text may be becoming a reality down the road.
At Unicode.org, there is an interesting illustrated pdf UTN #22: Robust Vertical Text Layout. It goes into gruesome detail about how vertical text can be arranged, how scripts are combined, and so on.
The consequences for CSS and the web are pretty broad. For one thing, it will allow content in the Yi and Mongolian scripts to make their way onto the web for the first time.
Another possibility is that we will see a resurgence in vertical text in the well-known languages Chinese, Japanese, Korean.
(Thanks to Brion VIBBER for pointing this out to me.)
A mockup of a hypothetical traditional Mongolian Wikipedia by Node_ue at Wikimedia Commons (no, that’s not sideways ☺)
Text orientation has always been hard, and the only OS who’s done a half-decent work at it is Mac OS, but even there, support for Mongolian was hard to achieve. Consider the fact that it’s not just a question of displaying individuals glyphs vertically, like Chinese, Japanese or Korean, but it’s an alphabet with ligatures – individual letters in a word are linked together, as you can see in the mock-up above [sweet btw]. The traditional Uighur-Mongol script is derived from Syriac, itself derived from Arabic, and used to be [we're talking 3/4 of a millenia here] written horizontally, àla Arabic, and later, when the Mongols ruled a quarter of the planet, or so it felt, the scroll was turned around counter-clockwise 90°, to make it look like a Chinese scroll. The habit stuck, and Mongolian – along with Manchu – is probably the only alphabetic language written vertically from left to right.
Incidentally, the completely native Mongolian script, phags-pa [well' that's Tibetan, and the dude in charge of inventing the script was a Tibetan Monk, but there you go], was vertical and the characters had no ligatures. Needless to say, its use was official only, and it died with the Yüan dynasty…
The consequences you mention are not just for CSS/the Web, but also for Desktop Publishing. I never managed to get any Mongolian text properly displayed in my Master’s and [unfinished] PhD theses. Typesetting Mongolian back then was a pain, and involved mainly images. I wish I had had some nice Quark XPress extension back then to type Mongolian and Manchu. It would have been very very nifty…
As for resurgence of vertical CJK text. Japanese haven’t abandonned it. Most newspapers and books are still typeset the old way. Korean newspapers have abandonned vertical text along with sinograms, and while I feel sad – nostalgia here I come – the “normal” way is indeed easier to read… As for Chinese, I have seen on and off newspapers with mixed typesetting, including horizontal titles to be read from right to left. But they were usually in traditional characters. But I don’t think the availability of a technical solution will lead to the rebirth of old customs. Maybe on the web – who knows? as it is easier to handle than publishing…
Anyway, as usual, I am amazed at the stuff you dig up :-)
Thanks, dda, informative as usual.
But what I really want to know is when CSS is going to handle Boustrophedon. Stick that in yer browser & float it!
And I am trying to make sure that text directions all work – all – in accessible PDF. So it isn’t being totally ignored.
Hi Joe,
I wasn’t meaning to imply that vertical text is being ignored; just taking a look at the emerging standards. Do you have any examples of pdfs with vertical text? I’d love to see one.
Thanks for the comment!
Unless you read some really old scriptures and/or one of those novels that tries to be fancy, most chinese writing is horizontal.. So its only natural to do horizontal writing on the web. I am chinese..
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If that’s not meant to be sideways, why are the Wikipedia globe and the little person sideways? Do Mongolians walk around with their head tilted at right angles, so that they would expect to see face icons looking at them sideways?
Jason - Thanks for the insight. It’s hard for me to evaluate how much demand there is for this sort of thing, it’s interesting to hear the opinion of a native speaker of Chinese.
Simetrical - It’s just a quick mockup that someone on the Wikipedia mailing list made to make the point. As far as I know gravity works just the same in Mongolia as elsewhere.
: )
Oh… you just turned your head sideways. :P
I disagree with Jason, even though the chinese scripts can also be written horizontally, they’re still widely used vertically. Obviously the result of typewriters and computers forced the scripts to become westernized, but here in Japan it’s still widely common to read and write vertically both kanji and kana. Everywhere from school, to giant billboards, to traditional restaurants (and even on the internet as images); I can easily see the practice of vertical scripts catching on, as they have survived through calligraphy in most of East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, etc.)
Concerning what DDA mentioned in his original comment, displaying complex vertical scripts will be no more different from displaying complex horizontal scripts. With an input typeface, such as IME’s for windows, it wouldn’t be any more impractical to implement. If it could be displayed on the web, it wouldn’t be much long afterwards when other applications will be able to display it as well.