Comment by qingcharles
18 hours ago
CJK languages can include vertical and RtL stretches too, to complicate matters. Here's some lyrics I made as a test:
https://codepen.io/kingcharlesone/pen/GgRXLoM
Japanese magazines usually mix three different script types on a majority of the pages like this:
(In another quirk some Japanese mags open right-bound, others open left-bound)
Chinese apparently was originally always written vertically top-to-bottom. (And then columns would be right-to-left.) Modern Chinese just rotates everything except the characters themselves 90 degrees to the Latin order.
I also read that a few Chinese texts only make sense in vertical order: one had a pun where the characters read one way as separated characters, but as stacked was also a single character pun for something like a "crumbly cookie".