Thursday, 23 June 2011

Vertical Text Layout — How To?

Over the past few years I have been getting more and more interested in Japanese culture, language, aikido, etc. and as some of you might know, traditionally Japanese text is written vertically (starting at top-right corner). Here's an example of such text in LibreOffice Calc (where I discovered how to do it)


What I don't know how to do, or if it's even possible, is typesetting a book / story / poem in such layout. I am basically looking for two approaches:
  1. LibreOffice Writer way. Here I know how to write Japanese, I even have some nice free, but sadly not libre fonts, but I don't know how to set vertical text layout. Anyone knows if it is possible and if so, how to do it?
  2. TeX way. I've been using plain TeX for ages but I still neither know how to typeset Japanese nor how to use vertical text layout there. Any pointers for both of these are welcome.


EDIT: ad 1. Looks like I have been blind. Thanks to Vorbote for useful links. It's as easy as doing Format->Page->Page->Text Direction = Right-to-left (vertical).

4 comments:

yosch said...

I'd recommend looking into XeTeX and the fontspec and xeCJK packages for vertical typesetting.

ibotty said...

you should have a look at context. it shines for non-western usecases. (it is very nice for western text as well ;)).

Anonymous said...

I'll leave you some links. :-)

http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=97615

http://neowiki.neooffice.org/index.php/Using_Right-to-Left,_Complex_Text_Layout,_and_Vertical_Text

Jens Petersen said...

So which font are you using?