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?
Chinese characters are all square. You know that lined paper for helping kids learn to write? For Chinese it’s a series of square cells with star shaped internal markings for aligning the characters. Having them be square means whether you write them vertically or horizontally it takes up the same amount of space overall.
Latin characters are mostly tall and narrow. You can write them vertically but then they will take up way more space than if you wrote them horizontally, so it’s annoying and difficult to read. The few times I’ve seen it I’m the wild I always have to pause and properly look at it instead of being able to read it as a glance, but that might also be due to me being used to reading English horizontally.
Also, some Latin characters like g or h are taller than the rest, but they extend in opposite directions, which makes it even more difficult to align the characters vertically. Capital and lowercase make this worse. In Chinese, there’s no character cases, and characters like 一 are defined as being centred in the square, so having that empty space when written vertically helps with alignment when reading.
Don’t know enough about Japanese or Korean to say but I’d assume they’re similar.
Also I’d imagine precedence has a lot to do with it too. If it’s been written both vertically and horizontally for thousands of years, people grow up used to reading it both ways. Latin languages expect horizontal only so we just don’t have experience at parsing it vertically so it takes longer.