【蛇】乙巳年庚辰月乙丑日 / 三月三十日
Saturday April 26, 2025

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