[Bug 62267] addition of Boustrophedon text support

[Shinobu Maehara]

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http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62267         




------- Additional Comments From congruwer yahoo co uk  2008-01-24 13:30 -------
"superly clever new way to look completly different" - Quite the opposite. It is used for ancient Greek and even older languages, but it fell out of style later. Latin is usually written from left to right, however one of our oldest attested samples of Old Latin was written boustrophedon, a testament to its age.

Unicode only defines the directions "left" and "right".
http://unicode.org/faq/bidi.html
These are normally interpreted as being relative to the reading direction, which according to Unicode can be logically "left" or "right", even though it may physically even be *vertical*. Unicode considers the actual, physical direction of text a style issue and thus provides no support for it. This means that for everything other than normally wrapping horizontal text extra support outside of Unicode is needed. For example, fonts that support languages like Japanese contain tables which specify which glyphs need to be rotated when text is written vertically and which don't. In this case the physical down direction is often considered logically "right" (this is what OpenOffice does) although in theory a program could also consider the physical down direction to be logically undirected (which is not a concept in Unicode), and rotate characters that need rotation clockwise or anticlockwise depending on their directionality, which has the advantage that the reading direction is constant.