Generally speaking, the standard way of script layout is from left-to-right, meaning horizontal in the world of internet or may be the expression “in the world of computers” would be more appropriate.  Even though we, meaning Japanese, feel quite confortable with this standards now, generally speaking in Japanese, the script layout is preferred to be written vertically when you’re talking about traditions.   Taketori JS is an opensource software written in JavaScript Library which lets you convert horizontal text to vertical text.

Discover the beauty of Japanese traditional script layout!

There is a vertical mode in some word processors but it’s quite difficult to apply the same when we talk about the web. Circumflex, diacritical marks, punctuation mark, and etc. there are plenty of difficulties in converting them.  I mean you can’t just turn the letter around and read as a vertical layout.  It’s just not that simple.  Taketori JS has all the features of repairing such scripts to vertical layout.

Not only that Taketori JS converts horizontal text to vertical text by JavaScript, what’s so cool about Taketori JS is that it even allows you to scroll horizontally when the texts are longer than the width of your web browser.

Bold letters are converted to dotted letters.

Furigana(Ruby) are supported and also bold letters will be converted to dotted letters. The underlines are converted to lines on left, lists and also floated images are supported. Also a bookmarklet is available for those of you who are willing to give it a try in any website you see.

Hope you’ll enjoy the art of traditional Japanese scripting!  C’mon! Give it a shot!!

Taketori JS
http://taketori.org/js.html (Japanese)