[XeTeX] Access of vertical CJK fonts preceeding with @

[Gerrit]

Hello Adam,

thanks for you answer. I didn’t know that the @ thing is a Windows 
feature. Well then I guess it does not work.

I just wondered if it might be an easy and actually good way to create 
vertical Japanese texts (not just a paragraph or a text box, but the 
entire document): Everything like columns, page break, sections etc. 
would work flawlessly . Incorporating Western text in the text would 
also work without any problems.

Basically I just thought about using the @ font, rotating the entire 
page 90° clockwise (so that the text is vertically and the alignment is 
correct), flipping the width and height size of the paper, so that a 
portrait paper stays a portrait paper, and then the text would work.
Horizontally written picture boxes/captions or tables etc. could be done 
with the normal rotating package (i.e., rotating them back). The only 
problem would maybe be the head and foot, because the rotated page would 
then have the head and foot on the right and left side, resp. But I 
thought about tackling that issue afterwords. Either way, I just wanted 
to try it out.

Rotating every glyph independently (like it is done in the xetex manual) 
does not seem to be that suitable for longer texts, and you would have 
to cope with many many many packages and other problems.

As far as I understood the vert feature, it works for rotating stuff 
like the colon (ten), the full stop (maru), brackets etc. A normal 
character would not have to be rotated. This is then necessary if you 
actually do it for rotating every single glyph, but not if the entire 
text becomes rotated and you basically just rotate the page backwards.

I actually really think that something like the @ thing would be the 
easiest way to implement vertical typeset into Xetex.

Gerrit

Am 06.12.2012 23:48, schrieb Adam Twardoch (List):
> Gerrit,
>
> this is a custom functionality of the Windows API, a "poor man's" method to get vertical typesetting in "normal" applications which cannot deal with real vertical typesetting. The "vert" feature is different: it provides additional 90 degree rotation for those glyphs which are read better in a horizontal arrangement rotated by 90 degrees. I.e. you use the "vert" feature in a*real*  vertcal typesetting context where CJK glyphs occur one under the other, but e.g. for Latin glyphs it makes sense to set them so that the reader has to turn his head to the right.
>
> So "vert" is completely independent of what you're asking. If XeTeX cannot do "proper" vertical typesetting then perhaps indeed there should be a font selection function that just rotates everything set in that font. I'd rather have such a mechanism exposed than to rely on a non-cross-platform "@" prefix "OS hack" (a hack actually provided by the OS). I don't know whether such mechanism already exists in XeTeX though. Perhaps it does?
>
> Either way, you'd still want to apply the "vert" feature to do additional 90 degree rotation for certain glyphs, or -- if used in the scenario you're proposing -- to actually*un-rotate*  them, so they bacome horizontal again.
>
> A.

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