Vertical text : asian characters unturned

[fxp33]

Hi,

Doing some testing I used the writing-mode property of css to display japanese characters vertically.

It worked for the alignment but unfortunately, the asian characters are turned 90 degrees.

Sigil 0.7.4 and Calibre viewer 1.15:
- text displayed vertical
- asian characters on the side
- latin characters on the side

Chrome 31 and IE10:
- text displayed vertical
- asian character displayed normally
- latin characters displayed on the side
(IE10 needs : writing-mode:tb-rl instead of writing-mode:vertical-rl)

Firefox 25
writing-mode doesn't work anyway.
The rotation below applies to the characters:
-moz-transform: rotate(90deg);

Here is the stylesheet I used

body {
  writing-mode:tb-rl;
  -epub-writing-mode: vertical-rl;
  -webkit-writing-mode: vertical-rl;
  line-break: normal;
  -epub-line-break: normal;
  -webkit-line-break: normal;
}

The good news is that it finally displayed fine on my Kobo Glo reader 3.1.1 (using jgoguen plugin).

François

[radius]

That's interesting. I would have expected that Sigil, Calibre and Chrome all have "viewers" based on derivatives of Webkit and would therefore display similarly.

It seems Google has fixed something for Chrome that didn't, or hasn't yet, gone back upstream and into the Qt Webkit view. I doubt there is anything Sigil can easily do about it short of fixing it in Qt.

I'm somewhat surprised that this works on Kobo. Do you have an epub that I could try on my Sony? I'm kind of curious now

[Toxaris]

Then again, I don't think vertical display works at all in ePUB2. So, there would be no need for Sigil to display it.

[Doitsu]

@fxp33: In case you want to generate backwards-compatible text, Ryan Stenhouse, came up with a vertical text hack, that works in Sigil, doesn't require <br /> tags after each Kanji and even supports vertical mono-spaced Latin text.

BTW, when Amazon started selling their Paperwhites also in Japan, they added vertical text support to new models and updated the firmware of older Paperwhites to support vertical text. For more information see this blog post.
The Kindle Publishing Guidlines mention that the Kindle compiler partially supports Sharp's XMDF format; does the Kobo support this format, too?

[fxp33]

Hi guys,

Thank you for answering and commenting this thread.

@Doitsu: Ryan Stenhouse's trick is very nice, thank you for sharing
As for xmdf... well, I have no clue, I will have to search internet to get one free book in this format. I'll make sure to post the result of my tries on Kobo.

@Radius: about the ebook, I only have the Hagakure that was attached to the first post of this thread. Sorry I am not sure it will safely support the conversion to sony format.

@Towaris: hmmm, didn't understand at first your comment on Sigil, I naively thought it was almost an epub3 editor... and then I searched the web and discovered that I was wrong (well, you know, the information was so hidden... only the first of the FAQ http://web.sigil.googlecode.com/git/.../Text/faq.html
It is much clearer now. Thank you for this crucial but disappointing enlightenment.

Regards to all,

François

[radius]

My apologies Francois, I didn't notice your attachment.

It turns out that this epub is too complex for my poor little Sony. I can only display the table of contents and jump to the last page; any other navigation causes a reboot. The version of ADE in the Sony doesn't even attempt to display vertically, I see question marks going left to right instead of up and down.

My desktop version of ADE (2.0.67275 on Mac) does show vertically, but almost all of the glyphs show as boxes. On one page where there is mixed Japanese and Latin, the Latin characters are properly rotate 90 degrees while the Japanese text is properly right side up. I think the whole book would display properly if I had the right fonts installed.

From this I think that modern reader with updated ADE might handle the book all right. I'm guessing this might be a moderately difficult change to Sigil unless there is Qt support.

[honneyStewPew]

Originally Posted by fxp33

Hi,

Doing some testing I used the writing-mode property of css to display japanese characters vertically.

It worked for the alignment but unfortunately, the asian characters are turned 90 degrees.

Sigil 0.7.4 and Calibre viewer 1.15:
- text displayed vertical
- asian characters on the side
- latin characters on the side

Chrome 31 and IE10:
- text displayed vertical
- asian character displayed normally
- latin characters displayed on the side
(IE10 needs : writing-mode:tb-rl instead of writing-mode:vertical-rl)

Firefox 25
writing-mode doesn't work anyway.
The rotation below applies to the characters:
-moz-transform: rotate(90deg);

Here is the stylesheet I used

body {
  writing-mode:tb-rl;
  -epub-writing-mode: vertical-rl;
  -webkit-writing-mode: vertical-rl;
  line-break: normal;
  -epub-line-break: normal;
  -webkit-line-break: normal;
}

The good news is that it finally displayed fine on my Kobo Glo reader 3.1.1 (using jgoguen plugin).

François

Is there a way to manually edit the css?

[fxp33]

Originally Posted by honneyStewPew

Is there a way to manually edit the css?

Hi, Honney

Not sure what you mean.
I use Sigil as an editor, and of course the css is inside the book, so you can modify it as much as you like. (notice that Calibre also has an editor that can be used).

Hope this helps, and if not, don't hesitate to give us more information about what you want to do.

Regards

François