Text from top to bottom (like Japanese)

[Mathias K.]

Hello everyone!

Does anyone know of a standard compliant possibility to display
text within a html page vertically?

Like:

°Ó
¥Î
¤Æ

instead of °Ó¥Î¤Æ.

I found something called "writing mode" to control this kind of flow within
the CSS3 specification, but afaik this is commonly supported by current
browsers.

So if anyone has an idea please tell me!


~ Mathias

 

[SpaceGirl]

Hello everyone!

Does anyone know of a standard compliant possibility to display
text within a html page vertically?

Like:

°Ó
¥Î
¤Æ

instead of °Ó¥Î¤Æ.

I found something called "writing mode" to control this kind of flow within
the CSS3 specification, but afaik this is commonly supported by current
browsers.

So if anyone has an idea please tell me!

~ Mathias

Even Japanese web sites don't do this. It's not very screen friendly
reading in columns, so I've yet to find a commercial site that does
this -- so begs the question, why try?

These days Japanese and Chinese is generally written left to right as
in the West.

 

[Mathias K.]

Thanks for your answer.

Actually i don't even want to display a whole text in columns from top to
bottom and right to left, it's only one column.

Within an online dictionary i want to display the original Japanese word in
a vertical column in the left, and to the right there shall be the
readings, translation and descriptions. So i want it to be written
vertically also for practical reasons.

Usually i could achieve this effect by putting a <br> tag between every
character. Now here's the problem: I'm working with PHP, which is not (yet)
UTF-8 compatible. Thus, i cannot simply split every byte (character) as i
could do with Western language strings, since Japanese characters can be 2
to 6 bytes long. That's why i hoped to find a HTML solution to this.

:-\


~ Mathias

 

[Ben C]

Even Japanese web sites don't do this. It's not very screen friendly
reading in columns, so I've yet to find a commercial site that does
this -- so begs the question, why try?

These days Japanese and Chinese is generally written left to right as
in the West.

Only on the web (where's there not much choice). Japanese books usually
go top-down and newspapers are usually a mixture.

 

[Ben C]

Thanks for your answer.

Actually i don't even want to display a whole text in columns from top to
bottom and right to left, it's only one column.

Within an online dictionary i want to display the original Japanese word in
a vertical column in the left, and to the right there shall be the
readings, translation and descriptions. So i want it to be written
vertically also for practical reasons.

Usually i could achieve this effect by putting a <br> tag between every
character. Now here's the problem: I'm working with PHP, which is not (yet)
UTF-8 compatible. Thus, i cannot simply split every byte (character) as i
could do with Western language strings, since Japanese characters can be 2
to 6 bytes long. That's why i hoped to find a HTML solution to this.

:-\

You could just put the word in a very narrow container since line breaks
are allowed between Japanese characters.

e.g.

<div style="width: 1px">
オンライン和英辞典
</div>

You might of course want to put that whole div in a slightly wider one
so the text doesn't overlap things to the right.

 

[Mathias K.]

Am Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:16:46 -0500 schrieb Ben C:

You could just put the word in a very narrow container since line breaks
are allowed between Japanese characters.

e.g.

<div style="width: 1px">
オンライン和英辞典
</div>

You might of course want to put that whole div in a slightly wider one
so the text doesn't overlap things to the right.

Dang! I didn't know linebreaks were allowed between Japanaese characters!
^^

Thanks SOOOO much!
It just works perfectly. ^_^


~ Mathias

 

[Ben C]

Am Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:16:46 -0500 schrieb Ben C:
[...]

You could just put the word in a very narrow container since line breaks
are allowed between Japanese characters.

e.g.

<div style="width: 1px">
?????????
</div>

You might of course want to put that whole div in a slightly wider one
so the text doesn't overlap things to the right.

Dang! I didn't know linebreaks were allowed between Japanaese characters!
^^

Not between all of them of course, you've got lenticular brackets and
things, but that should be OK.

In general you can line-break between ideographs. If you couldn't lines
would get very long since there are no spaces between them.

 

[Mathias K.]

Yeah that definitely makes sense. :'-)
I kind of didn't take that into consideration. Thanks again.

~ Mathias

 

[Animesh K]

Am Thu, 19 Jul 2007 11:16:46 -0500 schrieb Ben C:


Dang! I didn't know linebreaks were allowed between Japanaese characters!
^^

Thanks SOOOO much!
It just works perfectly. ^_^


~ Mathias

You can always keep space between successive Japanese characters. That
way you don't have to worry about which browser is not obeying that
rule, etc.