Hi,
At Fri, 30 Mar 2001 20:40:42 +0400,
Alexander Voropay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> AFAIK, a lot of papers in Japan are printed in Top-to-Bottom direction,
> not only Left-to-Right.
This is true. At least major Japanese newspapers (Asahi, Yomiuri,
Mainichi, Sankei, and Nikkei) are written in T-to-B direction. And
more, major part of Japanese books are written in T-to-B direction.
Exceptions are science, mathematics, and languages field. Captions
in maps and atlases are also written in L-to-R. Non-publication-purpose
printings such as circulations in a company are usually written in
L-to-R, because it is easier to write by word processor. Letters can
be either but if we want to be polite we should use T-to-B direction.
Balloons of comics are T-to-B, this is different from Korean. I have
read a petition for a lawsuit and it was written in T-to-B. Bills
or accounts, receipts, and so on are in L-to-R. Directions for
medicines, electric products, and so on are in L-to-R. Please ask
me anything for daily life which you are interested in.
However, I think it is optional, because it is layout problem and I can
read anything which are written in L-to-R direction. (However, I heard
that some languages such as Mongol have only one direction of T-to-B.
I don't know much on it.) This is because it would be difficult for
XTerm to support T-to-B while we can read both L-to-R and T-to-B without
misunderstanding. (Of course different glyphs must be used for
parentheses and so on for T-to-B and L-to-R. However, this is
a problem for typesetting, not plain text.)
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://surfchem0.riken.go.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"
http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
