However, zhuyin in Taiwanese Chinese is usually written vertically regardless of the direction of the main text.

Inserted text in the Roman alphabet is usually written horizontally, or turned sideways when it appears in vertical text, with the base of the characters on the left.

Right-to-left horizontal writing

Historically, vertical writing was the standard system, and horizontal writing was only used where a sign had to fit in a constrained space, such as over the gate of a temple or the signboard of a shop. This horizontal writing is in fact a special case of vertical writing in which each column contains just one character.

Therefore, before the end of World War II in Japan, those signs were read right to left.

Today, the left-to-right direction is dominant in all three languages for horizontal writing: this is due partly to the influence of English and other Western languages to make it easier to read when the two languages are found together (for example, on signs at an airport or train station), and partly to the increased use of computerized typesetting and word processing software, most of which does not directly support right-to-left layout of East Asian languages. However, right-to-left horizontal writing is still seen in these scripts, in such places as signs, on the right-hand side of vehicles, and on the right-hand side of stands selling food at festivals. It is also used to simulate archaic writing, for example in reconstructions of old Japan for tourists, and it is still found in the captions and titles of some newspapers.

History

Chinese

The first{{Citation needed|date=July 2011}} printed Chinese text in horizontal alignment was Robert Morrison's "Dictionary of the Chinese language", published in 1815–1823 in Macau.

The earliest widely known Chinese publication using horizontal alignment was the magazine Science ({{lang|zh-Hant|科學}}). Its first issue in January 1915 explained the (then) unusual format:

{{lang|zh-Hant|本雜誌印法，旁行上左，並用西文句讀點之，以便插寫算術及物理化學諸程式，非故好新奇，讀者諒之。}}

This magazine is printed so that it goes sideways from the top left, and is marked with Western punctuation. This is to make the insertion of mathematical, physical and chemical formulae convenient, not for the sake of novelty-hunting. We ask our readers to excuse us.

In the subsequent decades, the occurrence of words in a Western script (predominantly English) became increasingly frequent, and readers began to appreciate the unwieldiness of rotating the paper at each occurrence for vertically set texts. This accelerated acceptance of horizontal writing.

With the proliferation of horizontal text, both horizontal and vertical came to be used concurrently. Proponents of horizontal text argued that vertical text in right-to-left columns was smudged easily when written, and moreover demanded greater movement from the eyes when read. Vertical text proponents considered horizontal text to be a break from established tradition.

After the success of the communist revolution in 1949, the People's Republic of China decided to use horizontal writing. All newspapers in China changed from vertical to horizontal alignment on January 1, 1956. In publications, text is run horizontally although book titles on spines and some newspaper headlines remain vertical for convenience. Inscriptions of signs on most state organs are still vertical.

In Singapore, vertical writing has also become rare. In Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among older overseas Chinese communities, horizontal writing has been gradually adopted since the 1990s. By the early 2000s, most newspapers in these areas had switched to left-to-right horizontal writing, either entirely or in a combination of vertical text with horizontal left-to-right headings.

Japanese

Horizontal text came into Japanese in the Meiji era, when the Japanese began to print Western language dictionaries. Initially they printed the dictionaries in a mixture of horizontal Western and vertical Japanese text, which meant readers had to rotate the book ninety degrees to read the Western text. Because this was unwieldy, the idea of yokogaki came to be accepted. One of the first publications to partially use yokogaki was a German to Japanese dictionary ({{lang|ja|袖珍挿図独和辞書}}, Shūchinsōzu Dokuwa Jisho, "pocket illustrated German to Japanese dictionary") published in 1885 (Meiji 18).

At the beginning of the change to horizontal alignment in Meiji era Japan, there was a short-lived form called migi yokogaki ({{lang|ja|右横書き}}, literally "right horizontal writing"), in contrast to hidari yokogaki, ({{lang|ja|左横書き}}, literally "left horizontal writing"), the current standard. This resembled the right-to-left horizontal writing style of languages such as Arabic with line breaks on the left. It was probably based on the traditional single-row right-to-left writing. This form was widely used for pre-WWII advertisements and official documents (like banknotes), but has not survived outside of old-fashioned signboards.

Vertical writing is still commonly used in Japan in novels, newspapers and magazines including the prolific manga comic book genre, while horizontal writing is used more often in other media, especially those containing English language references.

Korean

Traditionally, Korean writing has been vertical, with columns running right to left.

In 1988, The Hankyoreh became the first Korean newspaper to use horizontal writing, and after 1990, all other major newspapers followed suit. Today, major Korean newspapers hardly ever run text vertically.

Usage

Calligraphy

In East Asian calligraphy, vertical writing remains the dominant direction.

Comics

Japanese comics, also known as manga, tend to use vertical direction for text. Manga frames tend to flow in right-to-left horizontal direction. Frames in yonkoma manga tend to flow in a vertical direction. Page ordering is the same as books that use vertical direction: from right to left. Frames that are chronologically before or after each other use less spacing in between as a visual cue.

Most manga text (dialog and narration) is written vertically, which dictates the vertical shapes of the speech bubbles. Some, however, such as Levius, are aimed at the international market and strive to optimize for translation and localization, therefore make use of horizontal text and speech bubbles. Some authors, such as Kenshi Hirokane, use Japanese text arranged horizontally to imply that a character is actually speaking in a foreign language, like English for example.

In some cases, horizontal writing in text bubbles may be used to indicate that a translation convention is in use – for example, that a character is actually speaking in English instead of Japanese.

Some publishers that translate manga into European languages may choose to keep the original page order (a notable example is Shonen Jump magazine), while other publishers may reverse the page flow with use of mirrored pages.

By modern countries

Japanese and Traditional Chinese

Both horizontal and vertical writing are used in Japan, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Traditional Chinese is also used in Mainland China in a few limited contexts, such as some books on ancient literature, or as an aesthetic choice for some signs on shops, temples, etc. In those contexts, both horizontal and vertical writing are used as well.

Vertical writing is commonly used for novels, newspapers, comics, and many other forms of writing. Because it goes downwards, vertical writing is invariably used on the spines of books. Some newspapers combine the two forms, using the vertical format for most articles but including some written horizontally, especially for headlines. Musical notation for some Japanese instruments such as the shakuhachi is written vertically.

Horizontal writing is easier for some purposes; academic texts are sometimes written this way since they often include words and phrases in other languages, which are more easily incorporated horizontally. Scientific and mathematical texts are nearly always written horizontally, since in vertical writing equations must be turned sideways, making them more difficult to read.

Similarly, English language textbooks, which contain many English words, are usually printed in horizontal writing. This is not a fixed rule, however, and it is also common to see English words printed sideways in vertical writing texts.

Computer text is usually presented in horizontal format; see Japanese language and computers.

Business cards in Japan (meishi) are often printed vertically in Japanese on one side, and horizontally in English on the other. Postcards and handwritten letters may be arranged horizontally or vertically, but the more formal the letter the more likely it is to be written vertically. Envelope addresses are usually vertical, with the recipient's address on the right and the recipient's name in the exact centre of the envelope. See also Japanese etiquette.

Simplified Chinese

In mainland China, where the Simplified Chinese orthographical reform has been adopted, vertical writing is now comparatively rare, more so in print than in writing and signage. Most publications are now printed in horizontal alignment, like English. Horizontal writing is written left to right in the vast majority of cases, with a few exceptions such as bilingual dictionaries of Chinese and right-to-left scripts like Arabic, in which case Chinese may follow the right-to-left alignment. Right-to-left writing direction can also often be seen on the right side of tourist buses, as it is customary to have the text run (on both sides of the vehicle) from the front of the bus to its rear.

Vertical alignment is generally used for artistic or aesthetic purposes (e.g. on logos and book covers), in scholarly works on Classical Chinese literature, or when space constraints demand it (e.g. on the spines of books and in labelling diagrams). Naturally, vertical text is also used on signs that are longer than they are wide; such signs are the norm at the entrances of schools, government offices and police stations. Calligraphy – in Simplified or Traditional Chinese – is invariably written vertically. Additionally, vertical text may still be encountered on some business cards and personal letters in China.

Since 2012, street markings are written vertically, but unorthodoxically from bottom to top. This is so that the characters are read from nearest to furthest from the drivers' perspective.^[1]

Korean

In modern Korea, vertical writing is uncommon. Modern Korean is usually written in left-to-right horizontally. Vertical writing is used when the writing space is long vertically and narrow horizontally. For example, titles on the spines of books are usually written vertically. When a foreign language film is subtitled into Korean, the subtitles are sometimes written vertically at the right side of the screen.

In the Standard language ({{lang|ko|표준어}}; {{lang|ko|標準語}}) of South Korea, punctuation marks are used differently in horizontal and vertical writing. Western punctuation marks are used in horizontal writing and the Japanese/Eastern-style punctuation marks are used in vertical writing. However, vertical writing using Western punctuation marks is sometimes found.

Vertical writing in computing

Computers

Early computer installations were designed only to support left-to-right horizontal writing based on the Latin alphabet. Today, most computer programs do not fully support the vertical writing system; however, most advanced word processing and publication software which target the East Asian region support the vertical writing system either fully or to a limited extent.

Even though vertical text display is generally not well supported, composing vertical text for print has been made possible. For example, on Asian editions of Windows, Asian fonts are also available in a vertical version, with font names prefixed by "@".^[2] Users can compose and edit the document as normal horizontal text. When complete, changing the text font to a vertical font converts the document to vertical orientation for printing purposes. Additionally, OpenType also has valt, vert, vhal, vkna, vkrn, vpal, vrt2, vrtr "feature tags" to define glyphs that can be transformed or adjusted within vertical text, they can be enabled or disabled in CSS3 using font-feature-settings property.^[3]

Text and layout on World Wide Web

Since the late 1990s, W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has been drafting Cascading Style Sheets properties to enable display on the Web of the various languages of the world according to their heritage text directions. Their latest efforts in 2011 show some revisions to the previous format for the Writing Mode property which provides for vertical layout and text display. The format "writing-mode:tb-rl" has been revised as "writing-mode: vertical-rl" in CSS, but the former syntax was preserved as a part of SVG 1.1 specification.

Among Web browsers, Internet Explorer is the first one that has been supporting vertical text and layout coded in HTML. Starting with IE 5.5 in 2000, Microsoft has enabled the writing mode property as a "Microsoft extension to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)". Google Chrome (since 8.0), Safari (since 5.1), Opera (since 15.0) has support the -webkit-writing-mode property.^[4] Mozilla Firefox got support for unprefixed writing-mode property in version 38.0, later enabled by default in version 41.0.^[4][5][6]

See also

• Bi-directional text
• Genkō yōshi
• Stroke order
• Writing system

References

Further reading

• Nihongo Daihakubutsukan ({{lang|ja|日本語大博物館}}), author: Jun'ichirō Kida ({{lang|ja|紀田順一郎}}), publisher: Just System ({{lang|ja|ジャストシステム}}, Jasuto Shisutemu) {{ISBN|4-88309-046-9}} (in Japanese), chapter 9, deals with the change from tategaki to yokogaki in modern Japanese.
• Ishikawa, Kyuyoh. Taction: The Drama of the Stylus in Oriental Calligraphy. Translated by Waku Miller. Tokyo: International House of Japan, 2011.
• Obana, Yasuko. “[https://www.jstor.org/pss/620771 Vertical or Horizontal? Reading Directions in Japanese],” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 60, no. 1 (1997): 86-94 (available in the JSTOR online journal archive).
• Nishiyama, Yutaka. 2010. The Mathematics of Direction in Writing. International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol.61, No.3, 347-356.

External links

• [https://www.w3.org/International/articles/vertical-text/ Styling vertical Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Mongolian text] W3C Internationalization Article 13 March 2017
• "CSS Writing Modes Module Level 3" W3C Working Draft 15 November 2012
• Grinols, Mark. "Using vertical layout in Internet Explorer 5.5" (Microsoft Corporation, October 2000)
• "Explaining why Chinese characters move vertically (tb-rl)" (a passage from Ishikawa Kyuyo's book)
• [https://www.unicode.org/notes/tn22/ Unicode Technical Note #22 Robust Vertical Text Layout]
• [https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr50/ Unicode Technical Annex #50 Unicode Vertical Text Layout]

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