They’ll Get Right On That!
Hot on the heels of reports that 1.3 billion Chinese readers will now have to use Adobe Mobile software or face execution, I was thinking about digging up some info about how one of the main Chinese ebook platforms was developed by the guy who invented the Chinese keyboard… and the screen display of Chinese characters… and was sort of a national hero… and had achieved practical solutions to real-world problems…
But before E-Zhongwen-pub really takes hold, one thing needs to happen for many Asian languages:
EPUB supports left-to-right or right-to-left writing direction using the CSS2 ‘direction’ property, but there is no way to specify that a script should be rendered top-to-bottom or bottom-to-top.
Of course, epub is an open, universal consumer format that renders the same on all devices and platforms, not an arbitrary one whose features be implemented (or not) on a whim, so:
I don’t think that reading systems should be required to support vertical text, but there should be a blessed method to indicate that a document or text block would be preferentially rendered vertically if the reading system supports it.
Oh.
Well, I’m sure businessmen and technology leaders in Hsinchu and Shanghai will jump behind what the bureaucrats have committed to… vaguely… in a single-sourced report, and stunt China’s ebook market growth by 2-5 years, as Sony has here!
Tags: .Epub, Asia, China, Ebooks, Government, Politics, Taiwan