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’s… just an order. Letters could go diagonally or back and forth, as long as everyone knows how to follow through them. It doesn’t matter where they are on the page, and yeah, you can do that with Latin text as well.
Logographs do carry information more densely, since they’re not constrained by actual speech sounds, but I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about. (They’re a lot harder to learn than a sane alphabetical system, as a tradeoff)