Using Vertical Text in Japanese and Chinese

Hi Brett,

I'm not entirely clear on what you're looking to do - as how would it be vertical, top to bottom and still right to left? I'm able to change the text box orientation as a whole and allow the text to appear up and down, but the letters are still in sequence next to each other, not on top of one another? Is that what you're looking for? 

Hi Ashley,

I guess I wasn't being very clear... Japanese (and Chinese and Korean) can be written in two different ways. The first is the same as English, from left to right with the second line appearing below the first line.

The second way is a vertical style where the text runs from top to bottom with the first line on the right side of the text box. The second line appear to the left of the first. So the text box isn't rotating, which would rotate the text within it, it is actually functioning differently typing from top to bottom starting at the top right corner of the textbox and continuing to the left for each subsequent line.

Hi Brett,

Thanks for that - and since this is a bit outside my area of expertise in terms of languages and different set ups, I'm going to ping a few colleagues who are much more advanced in this area! 

Hi Ashley,

Thanks for the reply. Here is a link that may be helpful:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_and_vertical_writing_in_East_Asian_scripts

Hi Brett, 

I discussed this with one of my colleagues who is on the product team and pretty well versed in all things languages. He shared the following (before losing power to some of the powerful storms hitting the east coast!):

Storyline doesn't currently support automatic vertical text layout for Asian languages. There is a work around that approximates this, but it's limited to single lines of text.

1. Type the text you want into a normal text box.
2. Resize the text box so that it is only one character wide. Because Chinese characters are essentially monospaced, they should line up correctly. The exceptions are marks of punctuation and numerals.

Here's an example:

So although that's not perfect and not entirely what you wanted, it was a good question to ask as now it's more visible in their pipeline for feature request. If you want to file it yourself (just for some extra umph) you can do so here. 

Thanks Ashley. I will put in a request for that.

Glad I could get you an answer on this one, as it had me stumped. 

Hi Brett,

have you found the better solution for this?

I am encountering the exact same issue for Japanese. I need to place the texts vertically and there is no simple solution I found.

Regards,

Junko

Hi Junko,

I haven't tried in a while and could be wrong but I don't think this has been addressed. We have just been sticking with the left to right, top to bottom layout. I have done some titles vertically but it's not really feasible to do any amount of body text in the workaround that Ashley describes.

You could put in a feature request.

Hi Brett,

thank you for your prompt reply.

I will submit a feature request..

Junko