Re: Comprehensive East-Asian support

[Steve Underwood <steveu coppice org>]

Mitsuru Oka wrote:

> At Mon, 31 Jan 2000 10:03:06 +0800,
> Steve Underwood <steveu@coppice.org> wrote:
> >
>
> > 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.
>
> I put some Japanese newpaper images and Japanese novel book
> image in my web site:
>
>   http://www.aist-nara.ac.jp/~mitsu-o/pango/
>
> These are typical top-to-bottom text examples in Japanese.
> --
> Mitsuru Oka

These are useful examples, thankyou. I was interested in the way the 2 digit
percentages are inserted into the vertical text. This is exactly the same practice as
in Chinese. I suspect that both languages use all the same practices for embedding
other scripts (Arabic numbers, Romance phrases, etc.) in the main language. More
examples will be needed to confirm this. I will try to find examples of the various
practices in Chinese and make scans available. I had a perfect example from a
newspaper last week, that looked like a model demonstration of every practice used,
but someone threw the paper away- arrh!

I looked through a Korean newspaper today. There was no vertical text. As far as I
could tell there was no right-to-left text, either. It seemed to be plain
left-to-right, formatted like left-to-right Chinese. I couldn't find any graphs with
y-axis labels, or other examples where vertical writing is presumably normal. I'll
need to find some examples of that to get a complete picture.

Is there anyone on this list who can read Korean and confirm it is never written
wither right-to-left or vertically?

Steve