Vertical text order for Mongolian and Chinese

[shadowmaster2503]

hi folks,

I wanted to write in classical Mongolian (chinese minority language and script) which is written vertically from top to bottom, the column order is from left to right.

In Vista there's an IME for this script, there are some fonts which support it like Mongol Baiti
I downloaded OO 3.0.1
I activated the complex script and the asian support
I added a Mongolian keyboard to Vista

In the writer:

In the page style setup I have only three options:
horizontal left to right
horizontal right to left (for arabic, persian, hebrew)
vertical right to left

What I am missing is this:
vertical left to right

that means "ine breaking" is wrong because it goes to the wrong direction.

Languages which make use of it:
mongolian script
Yi script
classical chinese

The headlines of classical chinese are written from right to left, the written text is vertically.
So how can I activate this?

Even the column option is buggy:

the preview shows vertical columns, the document shows rows. That means the developers rotated the document but they didn't care about the line breaking or this feature is not yet available.

That affects as well the table layout, it is also 90° rotated. I have to define rows to get columns.

90° clockwise rotation is also possible in lot of other word processors....

my main question is:
How can I fix the settings in OO writer to get left to right vertical text correctly?

[Robert Tucker]

It looks as if left-to-right vertical may have been virtually abandoned.

Maybe you could find out about RedOffice, in regard to which I found the following quote:

Redflag’s main product, RedOffice, is the first domestically developed cross-platform software package, having such functions as word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, drawing tools, website development, and database management. Furthermore, there are multi-dialect versions in Uigur, Mongolian and Tibetan for those small tribes in China.

http://www.sino-i.com/files/4dc1d235-1e ... 0c24ad.pdf

The person to try to contact would seem to be Jia Yanmin in the case of both OpenOffice and RedOffice.

[shadowmaster2503]

Here is the proposal of Jia Yanmin

http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2 ... day_90.pdf

In 2007 he made a proposal how to make a solid technical solution for this vertical/complex character problem.
It seems the Openoffice developers decided to use the "cheap" method by simply rotating the document by 90°
Word 2003 has the same odds

For XP theres the Menksoft2008 IME for Windows XP and others which support the Chinese IME for having the Vista-like functionality for mongolian script.

I give the red flag office a try.... 120 Yuan / 10$ is not too much for the standard edition and in June I am in China on a short visit.

[Robert Tucker]

The OpenOffice plans for "Vertical Text Layout in Writer" in 2002 can be found here:

http://l10n.openoffice.org/i18n_framewo ... riter.html

Left-to-right vertical definitely seemed to be in the pipeline then.

[Starfire]

I know this is a couple of years late in coming, but you can use OOO writer to write/display/print text in a vertical format top to bottom and left to right. All you have to do is use the columns feature. Set number of columns to between 45-52 and adjust your font to a size that will fit without cutting off any features of any of the wider letters. This forces writer to display a single character on each line of the column before moving down to the next line for the next letter, and as the columns are ordered left to right, your orientation will be correct for languages that require a top to bottom left to right vertical display. If you want to export this to Microsoft Word (which says it will allow me to have up to 45 columns on a page but refused to allow me to create them using Word), you need to set the number of columns to 45 (more didn't work for me), and margins to 1 inch all around and then do a Save As Word document. I needed a size 16 font in Word in order for it to put a single character per line in each column, and I also needed to switch View to Print Display so that it didn't look like one long string going down the page forever, though Print Preview and Print looked and worked correctly.

I am using OOO 3.3 on WIn7, and both documents I described above with 52 columns in OOO and 45 in the document I created using OOO for Word 2000, work fine.

[Starfire]

Sorry, but I forgot to add that I needed to create my own font to use with the document. I used a font creator program that allowed me to adjust the width of each letter in the font and made certain that they all lined up correctly so that they were centered over each other, whether they filled the entire character box or not. This allowed the width I needed for the stems to fit into the columns and prevented more than one of the skinnier letters being printed on the same line.