Horizontal and Vertical Writing in East Asian Scripts - Vertical Writing and Computers

Vertical Writing and Computers

Early computer installations were designed only to support left-to-right horizontal writing based on the Latin alphabet. Today, most computer programs do not fully support the vertical writing system; however, most advanced word processing and publication software which target the East Asian region support the vertical writing system either fully or to a limited extent.

Even though vertical text display is generally not well supported, composing vertical text for print has been made possible. For example, on Asian editions of Windows, Asian fonts are also available in a vertical version, with font names prefixed by "@". Users can compose and edit the document as normal horizontal text. When complete, changing the text font to a vertical font converts the document to vertical orientation for printing purposes.

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