[libreoffice-users] Re: Combining vertical text direction of page with ‘right-to-left’ text direction of a table

Hello Regina,

First, note that very few active RTL users are subscribed to the users' 
mailing list; at least - to my knowledge. For discussions of RTL 
considerations, it is often more useful to try:

irc://libera.chat/libreoffice-rtl
Telegram Group "LibreOffice RTL"
Matrix room https://matrix.to/#/#libreoffice-rtl:libera.chat

(these are now all bridged together.)

Second (and again not answering your questions...) let let me give some 
context info.

To the best om my understanding, the "RTL Vertical" and "LTR Vertical" 
exist to accommodate CJK scripts in which the glyphs appear in columns, 
and RTL/LTR is about the order of the columns of glyphs. i.e. the 
vertical axis is minor and the horizontal is major. I am not aware of 
proper-RTL scripts in which glyphs are written from top to bottom.

An exception could be those RTL scripts which have common non-connected 
forms (Hebrew, N'Ko, Mende), where some vertical billboards can in 
theory show one glyph after another in vertical order. This is extremely 
rare for the case of Hebrew, and will certainly not be used for anything 
that's multi-line. I don't know people from Western Africa, so in theory 
they could have that. In Arabic and related scripts I am assuming - 
based on some, but partial, knowledge - that this is considered irrelevant.

It is more common however - but still rare - for RTL text to be rotated, 
so that the glyphs progress horizontally in their own coordinate system, 
but vertically in the page's coordinate system. This is what you get if 
you set the Text Direction to "Right-to-Left (Vertical)" in LO Writer. I 
actually believe that this is an inappropriate state of affairs, because 
in CJK, the glyphs are _not_ rotated in Vertical text direction. I would 
have filed a bug about this, but actually I just tried this today for 
the first time, since the vertical text direction is not offered for RTL 
unless you also enable CJK languages...

Anyway, with this being the state of affairs, I do not even know how the 
ODF spec _expects_ Vertical LTR or RTL text to be rendered - if at all. 
If you can point us to what it says about this, perhaps I could fully 
answer.

I will say, though, that in principle there is no reason why a CJK 
vertical-direction page of text cannot have a table with Hebrew or 
Arabic text. For example, a public space sign in an Asian country's 
airport might have vertical-direction progression and a small 
translation table of terms containing RTL text.

But I don't think that the RTL'ness itself is the real issue here, 
because almost all of the problems such situations present would also 
face us with LTR text.

Eyal


> Hi all,
>
> I’m on working to specify the property “style:writing-mode” for ODF. That property is called “text 
> direction” in the UI of LibreOffice.
>
>
> A page in a text document has the setting “Text direction” in section “Paper Format” on tab “Page” 
> of the “Page Style” dialog. Possible values are
>
> Left-to-right (horizontal)
> Right-to-left (horizontal)
> Right-to-left (vertical)
> Left-to-right (vertical)
>
> A table has the setting “Text direction” in section “Properties” on tab “Table” in “Table 
> Properties” dialog. Possible values are
>
> Left-to-right (LTR)
> Right-to-left (RTL)
> Use superordinate object settings
>
> LibreOffice can combine a vertical text direction at the page with RTL text direction of the table.
>
>
> Are such combinations actually used in documents?
> Does LibreOffice render the texts in the way users need it?
> What is the intended behavior of such combinations?
>
> Kind regards,
> Regina



--
To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscribe@global.libreoffice.org
Problems? https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/
Posting guidelines + more: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette
List archive: https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/
Privacy Policy: https://www.documentfoundation.org/privacy