Japanese Vertical Text ( 縦書き ) and Furigana/Yomigana ( 振り仮名 ) support?

I have been waiting for Apple to support Japanese writing (top-to-bottom, right-to-left) and the ability to place furigana (pronunciation guides on top of kanji characters) ever since Pages was released. Does anyone know if this can be done yet?

No, it has not yet been included. As before, I think the only apps which support these features are MS Office, NeoOffice, OpenOffice, LightwayText, and probably the Japanese version of Adobe Indesign.

To convey your wishes to Apple, use the feedback item in the Pages menu, it's only other users who read stuff here.

As a occasional Chinese writer, I do hope that Pages provides vertical text and right-to-left support, too. I will also glad if Pages can let me have the ability to set different character spacing for punctuation, as Chinese writing often involves double (or more) punctuation marks against each other.

I have leave my high hopes to Apple through feedback, and hopefully something could be done through updates, hurhur.

Tom, glad to see you again. 🙂

I think that is one of the first identified shortcomings of Pages. That and native Save to Word format.

And yes, Tom, you are right that the Japanese version of InDesign supports it. I have downloaded the test version and checked it out.

I went to the very low traffic Japanese version of this forum at http://discussions.info.apple.co.jp/WebX?14@644.XzjLbgOg7l8.0@.f02b4dc .

Someone there pointed out that vertical text was supported in the Japanese version of AppleWorks, which no longer is sold. This means that users who created documents with vertical text in AppleWorks have no legal way of sharing them today with new co-workers, family members or switchers who need to update them.

The first complaint about this shortcoming that I found in the Japanese discussion forums was from January 2005, close to three years ago. At the time I expected it to come in a quick software patch at most a few months later, but I have since lost hope.

Another application that supports vertical writing is Egword by the way.

This means that users who created documents with vertical text in AppleWorks have no legal way of sharing them today with new co-workers, family members or switchers who need to update them.

I remember that the OS 9 page of the Chinese-Mac site has a special AW template for vertical text, but don't know if that helps this problem:

http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/pages/os9.html

Wow! That's an epiphany! I had no idea that worked.

To be honest, it does not solve the problem in my initial post, as AppleWorks is not legally available for purchase anywhere any more except perhaps eBay, but it was very interesting to see anyhow.

I think similar solutions can be applied to other products. If you have an InDesign file created by Adobe's Japanese edition with vertical text and furigana, you can open it in the English version and do some copy and paste and Save As. However, it is of course quite inconvenient in the long run.