{"id":7688,"date":"2012-01-03T17:48:42","date_gmt":"2012-01-03T22:48:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=7688"},"modified":"2012-01-03T17:48:42","modified_gmt":"2012-01-03T22:48:42","slug":"vertalic-font","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=7688","title":{"rendered":"Vertalic font"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent post I floated future display technologies in which text might appear to hover in the air between people. And I discussed a potential problem: if both people want to read that text from left-to-right (or from right-to-left, should they live in Tel Aviv), then their respective views of corresponding parts of a document will not line up.<\/p>\n

Sharon pointed out that it might be asking too much to ask people to adapt to vertical text, and then Xiao commented that it would probably be a lot easier for China or Japan to adapt the idea of vertical text, since traditional Hanzu and Kanji are already written vertically.<\/p>\n

Not wanting our Western culture to fall hopelessly behind in future literacy, I played around with various fonts, and I discovered that an italic font works quite well for vertical text, since “slanted forward” in a horizontal orientation can also be read as “slanted backward” in a vertical orientation. The result is far easier to read than it is for non-italic fonts:<\/p>\n


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\n<\/center><\/p>\n

Each of the two conversants would see a different view of any individual letter, with every letter slanting to that person’s respective rightward direction. But the location<\/i> of each letter in space would be the same for both conversants. Perhaps this combination of vertical orientation (and consequently, vertical kerning), with italic letters should be called a vertalic font.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a recent post I floated future display technologies in which text might appear to hover in the air between people. And I discussed a potential problem: if both people want to read that text from left-to-right (or from right-to-left, should they live in Tel Aviv), then their respective views of corresponding parts of a … Continue reading “Vertalic font”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7688"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7688"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7690,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7688\/revisions\/7690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}