Japanese Vertical Text

[Pedro Dias]

I work a lot with Japanese texts and this would be my request feature number 1.

When you are writing in horizontal, you can change your selected text to vertical orientation. (When I tried , that bar didn't flip from horizontal to vertical.)

Like this example: (カレー).

(This is wrong writing)    x  (This is acceptable) 

    カ                                            カ

    レ                                            レ  

x  ー                                     >      |

That also works inside Text Editor for mac, when you go to Layout Orientation > Vertical.

My other suggestion is to add something like World and iPages that is called > Phonetic Guide Text. (It's used for both Japanese and Chinese called Furigana or Ruby)

Japanese Indesign has all these features for writing in Japanese too.

Arigatou!

[Drbgaijin]

As I work a lot in Japanese the Vertical orientation feature mentioned above is essential.
If Affinity cannot do this, then sales in Japan and among people using Japanese will be slow.

Fingers crossed that such a function will be added relatively soon.

Regards

Douglas

[William Overington]

I have not used Japanese text myself and know very little about it, but I do seem to remember something about fonts with a @ character at the start of the file name and they possibly being something to do with vertical text.

Does that ring a bell for anybody here?

I am just wondering whether a font designed for vertical text needs to be used and whether it is one that starts with an @ at the start of the name.

This is just wondering, I might be totally wrong about this.

William

 

[William Overington]

I have just found the following.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writing_in_East_Asian_scripts#Computers

Does that help?

My Windows 10 computer has some of these fonts that have a name starting with an @ symbol, so maybe many or even all Windows 10 computers get some of them provided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writing_in_East_Asian_scripts

William

 

[William Overington]

An interesting thing is the @ fonts on my computer show up when formatting text in PagePlus but not when formatting text in Affinity Publisher.

Is this perhaps because Affinity Publisher is doing (in a beta test manner!) behind the scenes what one needs to do manually with PagePlus?

I cannot find a way to set text as vertical orientation. Is there such a facility in Affinity Publisher and if so, how does one use it please?

William

 

[walt.farrell]

51 minutes ago, William Overington said:

Is there such a facility in Affinity Publisher

No.

[Alfred]

54 minutes ago, William Overington said:

I cannot find a way to set text as vertical orientation. Is there such a facility in Affinity Publisher and if so, how does one use it please?

I think the only way to do it at present is to use narrow columns (as you would in PagePlus).

[William Overington]

So does one need the @ fonts? If so, I am wondering why I cannot get them listed in Affinity Publisher when I can get them listed in PagePlus?

William

3 minutes ago, Alfred said:

I think the only way to do it at present is to use narrow columns (as you would in PagePlus).

I have not actually done it, so I am not sure quite what you mean …. does one need to change the font?

I am wondering, just from what I have read, whether one needs to use horizontal columns and then change the font to an @font and rotate the column for it to become vertical.

Also, do the columns need to go from right to left? I seem to remember that from something many years ago about Chinese calligraphy, but that may not be the same for Japanese.

It is all very interesting.

William

 

[Alfred]

19 hours ago, William Overington said:

I have not actually done it, so I am not sure quite what you mean …. does one need to change the font?

I am wondering, just from what I have read, whether one needs to use horizontal columns and then change the font to an @font and rotate the column for it to become vertical.

Please try it and report back!

Quote

Also, do the columns need to go from right to left? I seem to remember that from something many years ago about Chinese calligraphy, but that may not be the same for Japanese.

That’s certainly true for Chinese, but I’m afraid I have no idea whether it also applies to Japanese.

[walt.farrell]

If one trusts Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_orthography#Direction_of_writing

[William Overington]

So, I can use PagePlus X7 reasonably well, and I am still learning Affinity Publisher and Affinity Publisher is still in beta, so try to get the desired result using PagePlus as a start.

Start with a text box 15 cm by 15 cm with its upper left corner at X=10 cm, Y=10 cm.

Paste the text from the example in the original post in this thread.

It came out as three 'tofu boxes' in 12 point Times New Roman.

So, noting that there is a @Yu Gothic font available for later in the test, format the text in Yu Gothic at 48 point.

Now, rotate the text box using Arrange Rotate right, knowing that it will be wrong, but to observe what one gets, just as background information.

Undo the rotate so as to be back as before.

Now, change the font to @Yu Gothic

Now rotate the text box to the right.

Yes! It gives the result wanted by the original poster.

Here is a png image.

So, can this be done using Affinity Publisher?

William

 

[William Overington]

I am trying to repeat the above experiment in Affinity Publisher, and although I can get the Yu Gothic font I cannot get the @Yu Gothic font.

I tried copying the text as typeset in the @Yu Gothic font over from PagePlus X7, but it does not work.

So is this a bug in Affinity Publisher that it does not pick up the @ fonts?

William

 

[William Overington]

2 hours ago, William Overington said:

I am trying to repeat the above experiment in Affinity Publisher, and although I can get the Yu Gothic font I cannot get the @Yu Gothic font.

I tried copying the text as typeset in the @Yu Gothic font over from PagePlus X7, but it does not work.

So is this a bug in Affinity Publisher that it does not pick up the @ fonts?

William

 

So is there an option somewhere as to whether one can switch on a facility to get to the @ fonts in Affinity Publisher?

It would be good if one could typeset Japanese text horizontally in a text frame, then select the text frame itself, click one "verticalize the text" button and then Affinity Publisher automatically substitute the font or fonts used in the text frame for the corresponding @ version and then rotate the text frame clockwise by 90 degrees - all of that done just by clicking one button.

William

 

[William Overington]

Any progress on this please?

William

 

[ashf]

Please add vertical text layout support.

[nmatsuo]

Agree, but it looks rather difficult to implement this feature.

Recently, iWorks and CSS in browsers are supporting vertical-text as follows.
https://tympanus.net/codrops/css_reference/text-orientation/
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209535

There are some amateur programers in Japan who try to do into their own application. Their answer to the question in the community forum might help for implementing vertical-text into Affinity products. Please review these threads.
https://teratail.com/questions/40691
https://teratail.com/questions/8881

Additionally, MS has provided code sample for managing vertical-text. It would be helpful.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/directwrite/vertical-text

Anyway, it's too hard if programer does not know CKJ text itself at all.

[ashf]

This is little old but might be informative.
CJKV Information Processing
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596514471.do

Also LibreOffice handles Asian text perfectly across multi platforms.
Dev team can refer their method to implement it to Affinity since it's an opensource project.

[tosicity]

私は開発者に問う。
日本語縦タイポグラフィを実装する予定があるのか、ないのか？
もし、この機能が実装されないなら、「Publisher」は日本の印刷関係者はこれを使用しないでしょう。

Edited June 13, 2019 by tosicity
Correction of expression

[tosicity]

It is a previous posting mistake.

I ask the developer.
Are you planning to implement Japanese vertical typography or not?
If this feature is not implemented, "Publisher" will not use it for Japanese print professionals.

[ashf]

On 4/8/2019 at 5:19 AM, William Overington said:

So is there an option somewhere as to whether one can switch on a facility to get to the @ fonts in Affinity Publisher?

It would be good if one could typeset Japanese text horizontally in a text frame, then select the text frame itself, click one "verticalize the text" button and then Affinity Publisher automatically substitute the font or fonts used in the text frame for the corresponding @ version and then rotate the text frame clockwise by 90 degrees - all of that done just by clicking one button.

William

 

@William Overington @ fonts works in only certain condition. and Affinity need to support this in order to use it. it's an ancient method to implement vertical text and available only on Windows.
Modern software usually don't use @ fonts method. so vertical text need to be implemented in modern way, not @ fonts.
 

[Peter Werner]

Affinity currently lacks a lot of options required for full professional CJK typesetting, including things like Furigana and Warichu, dedicated composition/line break options etc., it's not just vertical text.

My understanding is that they are going to get the basic features for roman typesetting done first to make Publisher and the rest of the Affinity range as usable as possible as a layout software for the roman languages and only then add features for full CJK and RTL language support a later point in time, which is completely understandable.

At least IME for CJK languages seems to work fine now in Affinity 1.7 after being completely broken in earlier releases. That's already a good indication that this topic isn't ignored by the development team.

I hope that one day we will have full CJK and RTL script support in Publisher. The last thing we could hope for is a messy and fragmented situation like with InDesign where you have to install multiple versions of InDesign in parallel, all of them developed by third party companies where you can only hope they don't mess each other's files up.

[tosicity]

Dear developers, please read and consider seriously.
I am not a programmer. So I can not understand how much you can not program.
Because of that, in Japan, design software has been working on the premise that Japanese vertical typography is implemented.
All the design applications of "illustrator", "Freehand", "Canvas", "Quark Xpress", "Pagemaker" and "InDesign" have implemented Japanese vertical typography.
We have never thought that vertical typography can not be done.

In the Japanese printing industry, we will avoid using apps that can not do "vertical writing typography" on a first look.
If you do not know, please be aware of this fact.
It seems that you have avoided this problem ever since the 2015 “Desiger” release.
I hope to put in a good mood soon.
We are in the "Adobe" prison, an absurd world where we can not even manipulate past data we created.
Please provide design tools that allow us to create freely without becoming refugees.

We aspire to implement Japanese vertical typography on all of "Pyblisher", "Designer" and "Photo".

/ / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / /
I do not think that it is naive English.

[ashf]

FYI, almost 100% of paper media and publications are in vertical text format in Japan.
So without vertical text support, Affinity Suite will be useless as a tool for them.
Thus Adobe is dominating the market, they support vertical text perfectly.

[ashf]

Long time ago, QuarkXpress was selling specialized version for Japanese and it costs three times as much as the original version.
Nevertheless, QuarkXpress was dominating the market at that time.
If Aisan language implementation is such burden for you, you can develop specialized version like that.
Even if you double the price for it, people will be willing to buy it.
Still much cheaper than InDesign or QuarkXPress.

[tosicity]

For developers.
Please tell us your opinion on the subject.
If you have a plan, show me the timetable.
If there is no plan at all. Please say that you will not implement Japanese typesetting.