Re: Display of Mongolian in Arabic or Hebrew documents

Andrew West wrote,
> ... For example, page 19 of this
> presentation (少数民族语言文字信息化) from 2005 shows various combinations of
> mixed Chinese, English, Tibetan, Mongolian and Uyghur text:
>
> <http://www.cmex.org.tw/cmex/documents/paper/CDF0304.pdf>
>
> Note that the examples in the top right corner show Mongolian,
> English, Chinese and Uyghur embedded in the same line within the
> context of a Uyghur (RTL) locale, but yet the Mongolian text reads
> LTR, just the same as it does in the Chinese (LTR) locale (as shown in
> the top left corner of the same page).

Then the convention might be to keep the head-tilting or
page-twirling to a minimum.

Here's an on-line graphic from "fantasai", who posted to this
list in a thread called "Vertical BIDI" 2004/05/14...
http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/discuss/directions/scans/qingzhen12-13

The scan shows vertical Arabic running from top to bottom.
(Another scan from this site shows both Arabic and Latin
embedded in vertical Chinese -- and the Arabic is running
from bottom to top!)
http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/discuss/directions/scans/

If your text was half Mongolian and half Arabic, you'd probably
split the page in two.  But, if you just *had* to embed them
together...

Arabic embedded into Mongolian vertical text may go from
top-to-bottom, especially if there's no conflicting LTR text
to complicate matters.  So, if you wanted to read the Arabic
parts, you'd rotate the page clockwise 90 degrees.  And, if
the next person coming along wanted to read the Mongolian,
the page would simply be rotated back.

If you take a page of Mongolian script and rotate it 90 degrees
clockwise, it's already RTL and even right-justified.  Isn't the
original 90 degree counter-clockwise rotation the reason that
this vertical script's columns run left-to-right?

Best regards,

James Kass