Stephen Zilles, Standards Architect, Adobe Systems, gave a talk tonite at IMUG on “Vertical Text on the World Wide Web” about W3C text formatting standards, such as CSS, SVG and XSL, for various languages.
Some interesting examples are Mongolian, which is written top to bottom, and Japanese, which can be written top to bottom or right to left, or tate-chu-yoko (horizontal within vertical), commonly used with numbers. Line-breaking may be codified in JIS X 4051. Ogham and Batak are bottom-to-top languages, which is not specifically supported.
Text formatting can include direction, rotation and transform properties, glyph orientation, line height and width.
Asian printing often uses rotation of English characters to conform to the block progression that started with vertical Chinese or Japanese, for example.
Thanks to Apple for hosting the meeting.
