To be clear, I’m not discussing vertical signage involving the Latin Alphabet such as this since I’m mainly discussing formatting entire book passages, sentences or even paragraphs of information in that manner in which Chinese, Japanese or Korean allow for that kind of writing orientation found in novels (chapter books) like this:

YBUZ62Arm0CsSE7.png

I’ve shared a excerpt from the first chapter of a book I’ve finished reading in Japanese, but the same writing format works for both Chinese and Korean. Is it because their characters look more “squarish” as they’re logographic meaning the orientation isn’t rigid allowing flexibility on being read either top to bottom vertically or left to right horizontally?

  • CameronDev@programming.dev
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    1 day ago

    I have been a leftie my entire life as well, and none of that matches my experience. I certainly don’t wear out my pens and rip up pages.

    My hand position puts my hand below the line, so I am not smudging my fingers across the text anyway, and other than being mirrored, is exactly how gripping the pen was taught to all of us at school. The wrist is relatively neutral, and the pen is angled down from the line.

    This is my handwriting, forgive the camera angle, and the poor cursive, I don’t handwrite much beyond scribbling notes:

    https://streamable.com/v7l92z

    • ...m...@ttrpg.network
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      1 day ago

      …and your face / torso is where the camera is?..if so, you’re writing vertically in columns, right-to-left; that’s how i write left-handed, but we’ve actually rotated the page 90º clockwise, and if we angle the page just a bit more ergonomically we’re literally upside-down from the right-handed paper position…

      (maybe you’re super-immortal)

      • CameronDev@programming.dev
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        20 hours ago

        Torso is a little to the left of the camera, and the notepad is tilted, but not to the extent that I would call it writing columns.

        I do see your point though.

        (I am semi-super immortal, I write left handed, but do everything else right. Can switch most things easily enough)

        • ...m...@ttrpg.network
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          20 hours ago

          …i’m old enough to have gone through gradeschool when the prevailing paradigm was for teachers to push all students to write right-handed (last i experienced that was corporate policy for all mice to be set up right-handed in the early nineties) so most of my peers growing up cultivated a grab-bag of super-immortal habits and terrible handwriting, to boot…