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 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