Direction of Text
Japanese can be written in two directions. Yokogaki style writes left-to-right, top-to-bottom, as with English. Tategaki style writes first top-to-bottom, and then moves right-to-left.
At present, handling of downward text is incomplete. For example, HTML has no support for tategaki and Japanese users must use HTML tables to simulate it. However, CSS level 3 includes a property "writing-mode" which can render tategaki when given the value "tb-rl" (i.e. top to bottom, right to left). Word processors and DTP software have more complete support for it.
Read more about this topic: Japanese Language And Computers
Famous quotes containing the words direction of, direction and/or text:
“Man alone resists the direction of gravitation: he constantly wants to fall—upwards.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“The mountainous region of the State of Maine stretches from near the White Mountains, northeasterly one hundred and sixty miles, to the head of the Aroostook River, and is about sixty miles wide. The wild or unsettled portion is far more extensive. So that some hours only of travel in this direction will carry the curious to the verge of a primitive forest, more interesting, perhaps, on all accounts, than they would reach by going a thousand miles westward.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)