Re: Characters that rotate in vertical text

[Yung-Fong Tang]

I think that is a hard problem

First of all. Take a look at
http://www.unicode.org/Public/4.0-Update/UCD-4.0.0d5b.html
and find the <vertical> one

Second, anything which need to be Symmetric Swap in Bidi probably need to be change in the vertical form. (If they need to be change in horizontal direction, they probably will need to be change in the vertical position)

However, this is not that easy. First, there are some characters could be rotate as optionl. For example, if you have English string "Book" in your vertical text, should software rotate it? or not?
It could rotate the whole text 90 as "Book", or it could displayed as
B
o
o
k

Both are "right". It depend on the application domain to decide how to display it. Which mean it need "a higher level protocol" look at the example in the session of 3.3 of http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-css3-text-20030226/

Second, it also depend on the people who design the glyph. For example, U+FF0C in a Traditional font have the comma in the central position- which mean it don't need to be change in the vertical layout. However, Japanese users think that position is funny for horizontal text and won't accept that. So the U+FF0C glyph in a Japanese font will be put in the left lower corner. and in that case, it need a different Glyph (note, not different unicode, but a different glyph id) to represent it in the Vertical layout. That is way you see on the Window system most of the font have a "@ variant" version there. That font is used for Veritcal layout and the same unicode map to different glyph id (so the , show up in the left upper position, center position, or right upper posiont [I  am not a typographer so I am not sure which one they choose, but one of them})

More info about Vertical text could be found at the following places
1. page 342-365, Chapter 7, Typography, CJKV Information Processing, Ken Lunde, O'Reilly, ISBN 1-56592-224-7,  http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cjkvinfo/
2. page 192-193, Developing International Software- 2nd Edition, Dr. International, Microsoft Press, ISBN 0-7356-1583-7 http://www.microsoft.com/mspress/books/5717.asp
They may have an online copy on the msdn




Rick Cameron wrote:

Hi, all

When Japanese (and, I imagine, other East Asian languages) is written vertically, certain characters are rotated by 90 degrees. Examples: the parenthesis-like characters in the block at U+3000, and U+30FC.

U+3000 is SPACE characters, I don't think it will need to be rotate, it should show BLANK anywan.

Does the Unicode character database include information on which characters are rotated in vertical text? If not, does anyone know of a definitive list?

Thanks

- rick cameron