[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [REVIEW] text, orientation, not text direction

[Lior Kaplan]

Can we go forward with the patch or anyone have more comments ?

Kaplan

On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 5:49 AM, Rafael Rocha Daud <rrdaud at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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 at 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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