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?
It is possible for languages written in the Latin alphabet as well. It’s just a pain in the ass to read. You can write cursive Chinese characters top to bottom; there is no vertical cursive script for the Latin ABC. All the connecting nodes are on the horizontal axis. The majority of people are right-handed. So tradition and convention has us reading left to right, top to bottom.
You can just turn the Latin characters on their side and all the connecting nodes will line up again.
But then its different from the sample Japanese text here. The orientation of all the characters does not change whether the text flows left to right, right to left, or top to bottom. Rotating the ABCs will actually worsen legibility in my opinion.
If the monks in The Name of the Rose times had come up with a vertical cursive script that stuck, maybe it would be different today. But that didn’t happen.