Japanese text - wrong direction

 From:  Michael Gibson
5611.11 In reply to 5611.10 
Hi Brian, thanks - I think that confirms it pretty well.

But now that I think about it, I guess I had probably better leave things as they currently are - otherwise if I process these fonts to rotate their letters it would mean that you could not use them anymore for their original purpose of making vertically oriented text after doing just one single rotate on the entire word.

In order to make a change to how it works currently in MoI I think I would have to not just "unrotate" these characters (which makes it more difficult to do vertical text), I'd need to also have some additional control for saying whether you want vertical or horizontal text so that you could enable that to get vertical text. But adding in more controls tends to complicate the UI and so that's a more significant change that I'm not sure about making right now.

Also that article you linked to: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/07/19/10331400.aspx makes it pretty clear that these fonts are intended to have rotated letters in them so that the entire string of horizontal text can be rotated 90 degrees afterwards, so MoI's current behavior is I think how it's supposed to work. Also as mentioned in the article these fonts do not actually have every single letter in them rotated, some non-CJK characters are not rotated in these fonts, so just applying an "unrotate" to all characters would actually make an incorrect rotation in some situations and also some CJK characters use a different variant for the vertical character so trying to "unrotate" them does not seem to be what you're supposed to do.

From what I can tell, the result that you get in MoI with the rotated characters (thus enabling vertical text after a 90 degree rotation on the entire word) is what is supposed to happen when using one of these particular @ fonts. It's just surprising to someone who does not regularly use these languages.

- Michael