You guys are not thinking things through. Firstly the fact that the only document we have was made with stamps rather than drawn by hand means nothing. Chinese can be written with a brush, a pen, a chisel, or it can be impressed into wax with a seal.
You have to look at the structure of the script and think of legibility. Firstly, most of the glyphs are strongly directional. Let us assume that we have a string of text PLUMED-HEAD SHIELD CLUB PEDESTRIAN BOOMERANG (that's as encoded in the backing store). The script shows RTL directionality, and when reading it we read into the face of the PLUMED-HEAD. SHIELD and CLUB are symmetrical, but PEDESTRIAN and BOOMERANG are not. The characters display as BOOMERANG PEDESTRIAN CLUB SHIELD PLUMED-HEAD, where plumed-head faces right and the boomerang points right as well. We read RTL. Now let us say I wish to represent this text LTR, as I do. Well if I reverse the presentation order without I get PLUMED-HEAD SHIELD CLUB PEDESTRIAN BOOMERANG -- but if I don't reverse the glyphs, than plumed-head is still facing to the right, as is the boomerang -- how am I to know that the directionality is LTR? I can't. I will start reading with the boomerang. Let's pretend we knew the syllabic values of these characters. PLUMED-HEAD is LA, SHIELD is BU, CLUB is GI, PEDESTRIAN is DA, BOOMERANG is NO. The correct reading must be LABUGIDANO, but if you reverse RTL directionality to LTR directionality without reversing the glyphs, you won't know that the directionality is changed, and you will be tempted to read NODAGIBULA. And what if that was a valid sequence in your language? That Godart did not make this correction in his book when he used LTR directionality was an error. I'm sticking by the decision I made when I made my fonts, because it is more likely to be right than not. There aren't any other scripts in the area which change directionality without reversing the glyphs, and Phaistos certainly isn't Chinese. -- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com
