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?
Latin Alphabet like in English is mostly phonetic and we aren’t looking at a an individual pictograph to read it, we have to scan across the word left to right to form it. Our eyes are used to this method and reading vertically is much much slower (besides the alphabet upper strokes and lower strokes messingbup vertical soacing)
Left to right or right to left eye movement is much more natural as we are usually scanning left to right while outside and much less up in the air down to your feet movements.