HOWTO input Chinese characters vertically

Asian languages (CJK) have an other typographical tradition. They used to write their text from top to bottom and from right to left. As in daily life however on digital devices the 'Western' way has taken over.

Internet

To display text vertically on the internet, see the internet howto

OpenOffice

In OpenOffice Calc, type the text in a cell, right click, Choose Format Cells ..., choose the Alignment tab, in text orientation section tick the box next to vertically stacked to display the text vertically. If you want the text also to be right to left, tick the Asian layout mode box.

Difficulties

Some of the considerations that need to be made are:

• Does the text need to be written right-to-left in vertical mode
• How to handle non-vertical languages ? do they need to be rotated ?
• Do (not) turn special characters, such as brackets

A very detailed document on the difficulties can be found on unicode website (link)

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Local links are in blue, links to other websites are in red, code/commands are in green

You need unicode fonts, a 4+ browser and Acrobat reader to fully explore and enjoy this webpage. (if necessary you can download Asian fontpacks for Adobe Acrobat reader)


My dissertation Hello Chinese! got published in 2002. It's a practical reference guide for using Chinese on the computer. More info


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