The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience [LWN.net]

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 22, 2011 9:03 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by pjm
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Han characters don't rotate when you go between traditional and Westernized layouts.
The Latin alphabet is not well designed for reading in traditional East Asian text layout.

to post comments

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 24, 2011 20:59 UTC (Thu) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link] (2 responses)

Whoosh!

pjm's comment went completely over your head. Your statements are true, but they are completely irrelevant to both pjm's point and the point to which he was responding.

The original comment from me@jasonclinton.com was "90 deg. rotated text is not legible." This statement is false to the point of absurdity, unless you have some hopelessly myopic and restrictive definition of text along the lines of "text = latin text". pjm was pointing out the obvious falsehood: East Asian languages use vertical text by default, and under no reasonable interpretation is such text "not legible".

It is true that Han characters don't rotate, but how is this at all relevant to the legibility of vertically oriented text? It isn't.

Similarly, the latin alphabet is not well designed for vertical text, but this is not relevant to any point that was being made in pjm's comment.

Vertical text

Posted Mar 24, 2011 21:05 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually, vertical Latin text works just fine for the GNOME 2 panel. I can read it without twisting my neck too badly (and without lifting the laptop from the table). But even that matters little: what's there to read on the panel? The Applications/Places/System pulldowns are pretty clear no matter what their orientation is, I really don't have to sound them out every time.

Vertical text

Posted Mar 25, 2011 15:05 UTC (Fri) by djao (guest, #4263) [Link]

For the GNOME 2 panel (haven't yet cut myself on the GNOME 3 bleeding edge), the date and time display becomes rotated and unreadable on vertical panels (and, sadly, even in Chinese, GNOME rotates the characters, which is not the right behavior). Conversely, the window titles in the task list are not rotated and thus are never capable of being displayed on a vertical panel unless you configure your panel to be inordinately wide. These are the main items of text that I would like to be able to read on vertical panels.

giving more vertical space in an interface

Posted Mar 25, 2011 4:56 UTC (Fri) by pjm (guest, #2080) [Link]

I'm sorry if my comment was interpreted as saying look how wrong you are; that wasn't my intent.

I'm excited that there are common languages that are legible in only a small amount of horizontal space, because it does allow putting some interface elements at the side of the screen or of a window when native English-speaking interface designers wouldn't usually think of that option. Icons are one tool that can help in allowing what might be a horizontal interface element (titles of windows/tabs/..., buttons, menus) to fit in a vertical space; using vertical text is another, and it's important to remember that vertically-oriented text (whether with glyph rotation or not) can work well in some languages better than in english. I thought a "one-line" response would make an impression that might inspire interface designers reading the thread, and might serve to remind them of this possibility for their creations.