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Alas, RTL is not the only direction a truly multilingual application must support… traditional Mongolian script (‘Bichig’) is written in vertical columns, and i
by bradrn 5y ago
Alas, RTL is not the only direction a truly multilingual application must support… traditional Mongolian script (‘Bichig’) is written in vertical columns, and is now considered an official script of Mongolia alongside Cyrillic. This means that applications and websites localised for Mongolian may need to support vertical writing (e.g. [0]). At least Bichig is still fairly uncommon in practice.
[0] http://mongol.people.com.cn/ http://mongol.people.com.cn/ (note this only renders correctly in Chrome for me)
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y agoVertical text can also be used for Chinese, Japanese and Korean, but I think it's uncommon and used for effect since computer software, including web browsers, has had such bad support for it for so long, and so LTR became the expectation.
- kingcharles 5y agoIt's funny that you almost never see vertical Asian text online, yet it is so common in the real world, especially in print. It is pretty crazy though that these languages have chosen LtR for their horizontal text, but RtL for vertical text. And when you throw English text into a passage, and numerals too, it gets to be a big fucking mess. EDIT: This page has an awesome summary of how complicated it gets (e.g. mixing vertical Chinese with RtL Arabic, "vertical" drop-down menus etc): https://www.w3.org/International/articles/vertical-text/ https://www.w3.org/International/articles/vertical-text/
- bradrn 5y ago> It is pretty crazy though that these languages have chosen LtR for their horizontal text, but RtL for vertical text It’s not actually that crazy: if you rotate RTL vertical text counterclockwise to get text starting from the top of the page, you get LTR horizontal text.
- TazeTSchnitzel 5y agoI think the use of LTR for horizontal text is due to western influence. I want to say that some very old signs are written RTL.