Hello,
In short, I think the patch addresses the issue correctly, and should be
applied as-is. Read on for detailed reasoning for this. Go to the last
paragraph for an additional proposal (might be an easy-hack? -- I can't
judge because none would be easy for me :-)).
According to this page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**
Horizontal_and_vertical_**writing_in_East_Asian_scripts<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writing_in_East_Asian_scripts>
)**, there are two separate things: text direction, which is LTR or RTL
(left-to-right and right-to-left), and text orientation, which is vertical
or horizontal. The new patch treats the function as orientation changing,
which it really is, so it should be applied.
But there's something more to it, which relates to the language you're
writing into. The thing is: all languages that use vertical orientation are
read right-to-left. The main example is Chinese. That article also states
that one-line (therefore horizontal) RTL are in fact special cases of
vertical writing, in which the columns have only one row. This is used when
there's small space to write into, for example, an horizontal sign above a
temple entrance. So we could say RTL direction and vertical orientation are
interchangeable and have the same meaning in practice. The patch treats
orientation, so saying vertical suffices. But, many of these languages can
also use horizontal, left-to-right writing. If you choose left-to-right in
the dialog (or horizontal with the patch applied), that's what you get,
even if you're writing in Chinese or Japanese. The behavior of the
application is consistent in this, and lets the user choose what kind of
writing he wants.
The caveat is someone writing in these languages could choose "horizontal"
and still expect to write right-to-left -- the special case of vertical
writing mentioned above (say they haven't read the wikipedia article, what
a shame). We could solve this by changing the "vertical" option to
"vertical (right-to-left for eastern asian scripts)", but I'm not sure this
is needed. We should also leave the horizontal option alone, for the reason
that middle-east languages (mainly arab and hebrew) are written
right-to-left, but horizontally. Plus, the cell properties doesn't change
this, the font does. If the font is right-to-left, then the text will be
written so, despite of what the dialog says (or it would become
unreadable). So we say "vertical (RTL for eastern asian scripts)" and
"horizontal", and let the font decide the direction. The dialog only takes
care of orientation.
But there's an additional issue. If the language you're writing into is
LTR, then if you choose "vertical" in the dialog, what happens is that the
text is rendered rotated 90 degrees to the right, so you have to incline
your head in that direction to read it properly. That's cool, because you
could use for example narrow columns and still write long words in them. I
once used this for the headers of a table.
So the current dialog is indeed incorrect, because it states
"right-to-left" but English would still be written LTR. Same as
"left-to-right", when Arab would still be written RTL (and couldn't be
otherwise, because of the ligatures).
My proposal is (apart from applying the patch):
The dialog would offer 3 options: (1) horizontal, (2) vertical (eastern
asian scripts), (3) vertical (other scripts). The first two would work just
as today, including the behaviour of rotating to the right when using the
second option with other than asian scripts. The change comes with the
third option: instead of rotating to the right, the scripts would be
rotated to the left. The reason is: there have been studies proving it's
much easier to read if you rotate to the left. I point this page [
http://www.arcoweb.com.br/**design/mostra-design-**
brasileiro-em-milao-publico-**italiano-ve-a-originalidade-**
do-design-brasileiro-avenida-**paulista-14-02-2003.html<http://www.arcoweb.com.br/design/mostra-design-brasileiro-em-milao-publico-italiano-ve-a-originalidade-do-design-brasileiro-avenida-paulista-14-02-2003.html>]
as an example. The lamp-posts in Paulista Av., São Paulo have been designed
in the 1920's by modernist architects, and they discovered that rotating to
the left makes the names of the streets more readable than when rotated to
the right. This works so well that is has been like this for many decades
now. And they're street signs! This third option would let us rotate the
words this way, while maintaing the ability to rotate right using the
second option. And since this would be a third option, there could be room
to add the ability to choose the rotation degree: 45, 60 or 90. That would
make it even more readable (but that would depend if the fonts could be
rendered this way). Do you think it's desirable (in the feature side) or
feasible (in the hacking side)?
Well, either way, thanks Lior for the patch, IMHO it could be applied
immediatly.
Best regards./
Rafael
PS.: the image attached shows the present behaviour I tried to describe.
Em 31-10-2011 14:05, Jan Holesovsky <kendy@suse.cz> escreveu:
Hi Lior,
Thank you for the patch! It seems that it caused some misunderstanding,
so maybe it might be good to CC: the UX guys for the suggestion of
wording? - CC'd now.
UX guys - please have a look at Lior's suggestion; for a screenshot of
what he means, see his original mail in the ML archive:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/**archives/libreoffice/2011-**
October/019944.html<http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2011-October/019944.html>
mainly:
http://lists.freedesktop.org/**archives/libreoffice/**
attachments/20111030/9a4f3746/**attachment-0001.png<http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/attachments/20111030/9a4f3746/attachment-0001.png>
http://lists.freedesktop.org/**archives/libreoffice/**
attachments/20111030/9a4f3746/**attachment-0002.obj<http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/attachments/20111030/9a4f3746/attachment-0002.obj>
How does that sound?
Thank you,
Kendy
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