Hi,
Are there any plans to support vertical writing modes in Wordgard? Japanese and other CJK text is commonly laid out with CSS writing-mode: vertical-rl.
Editing vertical text in contenteditable is still unreliable — for example, Safari still has open caret bugs in vertical writing modes. Since Wordgard handles cursor motion itself rather than leaving it to the browser, it seems well positioned to get this right.
Thanks!
I have not put serious thought into this yet, since I wasn’t aware that there’s actual demand for it—I know it’s often used in classical Japanese, but in my limited exposure to modern digital Japanese text, I always see it laid out left-to-right. Is that partly due to technical limitations? What are situations in which people would prefer vertical layout?
Vertical writing is still a mainstream typesetting style in modern Japanese.
To begin with, vertical writing is not limited to classical texts. Even today, literary works—novels above all—are set vertically almost without exception, and this holds not only for print books but for EPUB e-books as well. Newspapers, the dialogue in manga, Japanese-language and literature textbooks, and tanka and haiku are all conventionally set vertically too.
One of the situations where Japanese users want a vertical-writing editor is writing novels. Authors who write vertically use either the native Word application, or dedicated vertical-writing editors such as Tateshiki (iOS) or Ichitaro.
Despite this demand, the web has no decent vertical-writing editor. This is due to technical constraints: over the past few years Chromium has made progress on things like arrow-key logical direction and vertical-writing IME, but once you use the core features of vertical writing—such as ruby and tate-chu-yoko—many browser-specific bugs lurk beneath the surface.
As a result, web novel sites and web-based writing tools would like to offer vertical writing as an option where possible, but technical constraints sometimes make this difficult. My goal is to make it possible for these web services to have that option.
Initially I considered submitting a PR to the browser itself. But going that route, a future in which services can actually adopt a vertical-writing editor would be ten years away. Wordgard was appealing because it manages the caret on the JS side, which lets you implement without worrying about cross-browser differences.
Interesting. I wasn’t aware of that.
But looking deeper into this, I think this would be more complex than I am comfortable with. Not only would I be working with a writing style that I myself am entirely unfamiliar with, and which is a lot more complicated than right-to-left (which pretty much behaves as a mirrored left-to-right style), with complications like Latin (or other horizontal) writing systems being used inside vertical lines, and layout in general working very differently.
I can imagine someone building a custom editor component on top of Wordgard’s data structures, or a fork, to support this, but I don’t plan to build and maintain such a thing myself.
Thanks for looking into this!
I’ll explore the option of forking or extending it for now.