Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2023 May 8

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May 8

Manchu orientation

The Manchu alphabet, being adapted from Mongolian script, is (was) normally written vertically; but here and there (e.g. Wanderwort) I see it horizontal. Oddly it goes left to right, and is thus upside-down compared to its Syriac ancestor!

But my question is: how was the orientation chosen? Does Unicode have separate blocks for vertical and horizontal Manchu? —Tamfang (talk) 04:51, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

My understanding is that Unicode fonts store the glyphs for top down writing are stored rotated so that if the output does not support formatting properly and they are output horizontally then people can still make sense of them. Personally I think they should have done the same for right to left writing and mirrored them in the stored form . NadVolum (talk) 18:35, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Search the internet for "Writing Manchu on a Western Computer" - I tried to link to it but it gives error messages I don't understand. The report has some discussion on mixed writing of French and Manchu. Apparently sometimes it is convenient to write short passages of vertical text horizontally when the main text is horizontal. 85.76.41.21 (talk) 18:16, 12 May 2023 (UTC)