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

The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

Posted Mar 24, 2011 20:59 UTC (Thu) by djao (guest, #4263)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience by mpr22
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's GNOME 3 experience

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.

to post comments

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.