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

[Rafael Rocha Daud]

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), 
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] 
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
>
> mainly:
>
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/attachments/20111030/9a4f3746/attachment-0001.png
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/attachments/20111030/9a4f3746/attachment-0002.obj
>
> How does that sound?
>
> Thank you,
> Kendy
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: recorte23:09.png
Type: image/png
Size: 20598 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice-ux-advise/attachments/20111101/300d1ae0/attachment-0001.png>