Re: Comprehensive East-Asian support

[Steve Underwood <steveu coppice org>]

Pablo Saratxaga wrote:

> Kaixo!
>
> On Sun, Jan 30, 2000 at 09:34:52PM +0800, Steve Underwood wrote:
>
> > options for left-to-right and right-to-left (I'm not sure if Japanese is
> > ever written right-to-left, now or in the past).
>
> Only for one line texts. It is considered as vertical writting with columns
> of one char length.

Does this imply that Japanese text is often written with a right-to-left title
line, and a vertical body below it? Interesting. I hadn't thought of that as a
possibility. So, there is one more special mode of Asian language handling to
consider. Maybe I should buy a Japanese and a Korean newspaper, and try to
figure these things out for myself. There is usually enough Hanzi that I can get
some kind of idea what the text is about.

[OT] Though the precise usage of Hanzi and Kanji differ, they are usually not
too far apart. When I questioned the name Pango, some people responsed that
U+82F1 U+6587, which means written English in Chinese means English literature
in Japanese. It loosely does in Chinese too, though its not how you would
normally express English literature. U+6587 has a sense of literature and
culture - hence it becomes part of a lot of Chinese names. So, the meanings are
in the same ballpark, and I can often get the gish of a piece of Japanese if it
is mostly Kanji.

Steve