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I am playing with VivaDesigner at the moment, and have some initial observations. On the plus side, it supports combining jamo via the 'ljmo', 'vjmo', and 'tjmo' features. On the negative side, it appears to support only BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane) code points. More than half of the characters in the Unicode Standard are outside of the BMP, so this is a real issue.

Yes, but you can keep the English (or whatever language) UI. Activating Japanese functionality is separate from the UI language. You are not forced to use a Japanese UI.

Yes, you need to have Japanese (aka East Asian) functionality active in order for the vertical text layout controls to be exposed. An article that I published on Medium a couple of years ago explains how to activate this. I referenced this article in an earlier post to this thread.

Quite.

I may have stated this previously in this thread, but I use InDesign on an almost daily basis, along with other Adobe apps by virtue of having a lifetime Creative Cloud subscription. I bought Affinity Publisher a year and a half ago, mainly to play with it. I believe there was a promotional price at the time. In other words, I am spoiled in that I am able to use a mature app that includes excellent features, such as vertical writing. Still, InDesign is far from perfect, and I still maintain my skills that expose bugs in that app, most of which are font-related, because that is my specialty. I also know how to bring InDesign to its knees. Click here for an example from four years ago. Anyway, Affinity Publisher is a more mature app than VectorStyler, and as a result, I believe that it is more difficult for them to change their layout paradigm to accommodate a new writing direction. More mature apps need to consider issues, such as backward compatibility and so on, when making fundamental changes to their layout paradigm. This is less of a concern for less mature apps, such as those still in Beta. I, for one, am grateful that there are apps out there, such as Affinity Publisher and vectorStyle, because any competition can serve as motivation for Adobe to improve InDesign, and to fix bugs sooner rather than later. For example, I found quite a few bugs in InDesign's support for Variable Fonts, one of which is a very fundamental issue that affects Illustrator and Photoshop as well.

While I confirmed that the current VectorStyler, which is advertised as Beta, certainly supports vertical writing, the input experience, at least with the default Japanese IME for macOS, is extremely subpar. Maybe it is because it is Beta.

Apparently you are not aware that full CJK functionality is easily activated in Adobe InDesign per my Medium article from a little over a year ago.

The first edition of my book was translated into Chinese (traditional) and Japanese, and both were published in 2002. Although the content does not benefit from the additional and updated material that is available in the second edition version of Chapter 7, Typography, please enjoy these small gifts. cjkvip1e-ja-ch7.pdf cjkvip1e-tc-ch7.pdf

I feel like I am beating a proverbial dead horse by adding my voice to this thread, but it nonetheless seems worthwhile to add my perspective to the other voices who have chimed in here. My background is that I have nearly three decades of experience dealing with CJK character sets, CJK encodings, CJK text layout, and CJK font development, with a very strong focus on the Unicode and Japanese aspects of those fields. I worked at Adobe for 28+ years. I should also state that I bought a license for Affinity Publisher late last year, but I generally do not use it mainly due to the lack of this very fundamental feature. In addition to supporting the appropriate OpenType features, in particular vert (Vertical Alternates), vertical text frames need to be added. There was also mention of supporting ruby, which is also referred to as furigana. While this feature is certainly used in horizontal layout, with the 50% glyphs floating above the characters they annotate, there are special considerations for vertical layout in terms of their placement relative to the characters they annotate. My daily-use layout app is Adobe InDesign, and have mine set up to expose full Japanese (and CJK) functionality. I am fortunate to have a lifetime Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, but decided to give Affinity Publisher a fair shake, which I did. While my entire book, CJKV Information Processing Second Edition, would certainly be helpful, Chapter 7, Typography, in particular would be the most helpful for the Affinity Publisher developers. Please find attached the PDF for Chapter 7 for your reading pleasure. While the book was published almost 12 years ago, its content is still completely relevant today. I suggest considering a Baby Steps™ approach, such as to start by adding support for 1) vertical text frames; 2) the OpenType 'vert' feature; 3) respecting the metrics in the OpenType vmtx (Vertical Metrics Table) table; and 4) the 90-degree clockwise rotation of Western text in vertical text layout. Also, be sure to study UAX #50, Unicode Vertical Text Layout. Adobe InDesign, with its full Japanese functionality exposed, is the most sophisticated Japanese text layout app on the planet, meaning that it represents an extremely high bar. Still, it is not without its flaws. When I typeset my book over 12 years ago, using Adobe InDesign CS3-J, I faced many issues. While I was able to resolve or work around all of the issues, I felt compelled to write a two-page White Paper that detailed the issues I faced. Interestingly, although it is 12 years later, many of the issues have not yet been resolved. Of course, I am using Adobe InDesign 2020, and will have access to the 2021 version in a little over a month from now. cjkvip2e-07.pdf