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:
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?
I suspect it’s because the characters in Japanese at least, all take up exactly the same sized box. We find English easier to read when it uses a proportional font, so different letters take up different widths.
Also, Japanese is commonly written top to bottom, left to right, in printed materials but left to right, top to bottom, when handwriting or for casual text. Once in a while, though, they do top to bottom, right to left. I’ve seen this in temples, so I think it’s a traditional format.
In my mind, left to right, top to bottom make sense when writing with ink, because then your hand doesn’t smudge the already-written characters. Unless you are a lefty, of course.
The traditional writing in CJ (can’t say about K) is top to bottom, then expand the lines to the left. I think you got it in reverse.
I believe this is the right answer. Additionally, one character in CJK languages represents a single syllable, so you get less line breaks per word. For example the world “union” can be transliterated to Korean as 유니온. Writing that vertically takes 5 lines in English (one line per letter), but only 3 lines in Korean:
유 니 온