How can I allign (show or print) Chinese text in vertical lines (from top down) which are in tern lined in a page from right to left (like the old traditional Chinese printed books)?
Two conditions are necessary.
- Writer must be configured to handle Asian scripts
- Open
Tools>Options,Language Settings>Languages - In Default Languages for Documents, tick Asian to enable Asian scripts
- Select one of
Chinesevariants
- Open
The page styles for the pages in Chinese must be modified to tell Writer the writing direction. For each such page style:
- Open the page style by right-clicking on its name in the style side panes (page styles are listed after a click on the fourth icon from left in the style toolbar) and
Modify - In the
Pagetab, select Text direction from the drop-down menu
If you aren’t familiar with styles, I recommend you read the Writer Guide for an introduction.
Thank you very much. I found it. My version is a little different from yours. First of all, I did not know what “style tool bar” was. In my version, I click on the Format drop down manu, which is the fifth in its bar, and found PageStyle. When I click it, I got “text Direction” without invoking “modify” which I did not see. In any case, thank you so much for giving the directions.
New the next question is: “Is it possible to keep some pages in vertical style but some others in horizonta style.” For instance, while writing horizontally, I want to tell my friends about traditional styles and want to give the next page in vertical style as an example. Do I have to create another document? Is it possible to combine two document into one (keeping their own style)?
My LO version is 7.3.6.2.
From your description, you reference the “standard” toolbar(s) at top of document window. I was talking about the style sidepane at right (if not visible, F11 except under MacOS where you must Styles>Manage Styles. This side pane has a small toolbar with icons representing the various style categories.
What you did from Format>Page Style was to modify the current pagestyle. This is not sufficient for your request about mixing horizontal and vertical writing directions. For that, you need two page styles, one for Western text, one for Chines vertical text.
You can keep Default Page Style for Western text. Create another page style for your Chinese text. To switch between both, Insert>More Breaks>Manual Break so that you can apply special attributes to the page break. In the popup dialog, select the page style to apply after the break.
In case you want only show examples of traditional top-down text direction, you need not change the entire page style. You can insert a frame instead and set the text direction in tab “Options” of the frame properties for this frame only.
Summary of @suokunlong’s answer for partial page vertical text:
- a text box with text direction customised
I don’t recommend this solution because text boxes are not part of main text flow and behave like images with poor formatting possibilities. It is better to use a frame instead though frames are also external to main flow but they have full formatting possibilities, notably styles. - a table where
Text Flowproperties are adjusted for vertical text orientation