Tower orientation font

[dontbugme]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

Is there anyone that know of a font that allows to write in tower orientation, in software that does not allow vertical text ?

Basically this means:
* write text horizontally, left->right
* rotate media 90 degrees right
* read text top to down, like in Chinese
* writing is English and numbers

So each character should be rotated 90 degrees in it's own cell.

The style is not really important.

I have not been able to find such font. Any input ?

[Andreas Stötzner]

I can help you with a clean sans font which I would just customize to meet your briefing.
Quick delivery, moderate fee. Contact me off-list: asA)signographieDde

[dontbugme]

@Andreas

passed on your contact details to client. May choose to contact you separately. Thanks for replying.

Btw: is the correct term "tower orientation" ? Have not found much related to this topic.

[hrant]

I'm sure Andreas can do it quickly and well. If you'd like a "second opinion" please do consider my type design services as well:
hpapazian at gmail dot com
http://themicrofoundry.com/

BTW what you want to end up with is usually simply called "vertical setting", but I'm not aware of a term for a font where the glyphs are rotated 90 degrees. Unless it's an extreme case of Rotalics! :-)
http://typographica.org/on-typography/a-fruitful-discomfort-the-face-of-...

hhp

[Té Rowan]

I think I once saw a faux-Chinese font set up this way, with one case as regular left-to-right and the other with the glyphs turned a quarter to the left so they would read top-to-bottom. Can't remember which or whose font it was, though.

Edit #1: I found it: Kingthings Conundrum. Lower case is turned.

[Indra Kupferschmid]

Yes, I know of one. What do you want this information for if the design doesn’t matter?

[Theunis de Jong]

On my system, I have a couple of fonts that use the OpenType tag 'vert', or an additional/ supplemental/ newer(?) implementation, 'vrt2', to implement 'faux-vertical' characters.
All of them are Adobe's CJK fonts:

Adobe Fangsong Std
Adobe Heiti Std
Adobe Kaiti Std
Adobe Song Std

and (most likely) came free with my installation of Adobe InDesign. A few Windows system fonts contain selected symbols only. SimSun, for example, contains rotated brackets, braces, and curly quotes.

The odd thing, however, is that these characters are rotated clockwise:

... forms suitable for vertical writing (that is, rotated 90 degrees clockwise).

That means that applying the feature to a string "hello" will result in (vertically read) "olleh"! Then again maybe I'm missing some subtlety of vertical writing.