The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20061114114835/http://homepage.mac.com:80/thgewecke/Manchu.html

Manchu Test Page


Some very basic Unicode fonts have recently become available for
Mongolian/Manchu. This is a difficult script to display, because it
should ideally run vertically and left-to-right, with connected glyphs
and positional variants much like Arabic.  Left-to-right and
right-to-left horizontal are also sometimes used.

This page shows the word "Manchu" in classic Mongolian/Manchu script
encoded in UTF-8, using CSS for 3 different writing directions. In
addition there are graphics of how the text might look on a browser,
and how the text should "really" look.  Finally there are some
references on the topic.

No Mac browser implements vertical display or glyph-rotation or RTL via
CSS yet. In addition, the Mac ST* series fonts have the glyphs in
vertical position, so they cannot display correctly in LTR either. 
However the Windows font Simsun-18030, which can also be used in Mac OS
X, has the glyphs rotated minus 90 degrees, so these will display in
the proper orientation in LTR (but still without connections or
positional variants).  With the Manchu keyboard mentioned in the
references, you can type LTR Mongolian/Manchu in OS X Cocoa
applications like TextEdit.

Windows IE6 does support vertical display, and in doing so rotates the
glyphs appropriately (plus 90 degrees).  With that system you should be
able to see both the LTR and vertical examples with correct
orientation.  However, the latter only works right-to-left, as for CJK
vertical scripts.  For anything over one line, the Manchu would need
to be composed bottom-to-top (as done in the Multi-Line example below).

RTL is shown in two examples, one using markup and one using the
Unicode RLO(202E) and PDF(202C) characters instead.  The latter has
much broader browser support.


Send comments to Tom Gewecke

Left-to-Right:

ᠮᠠᠨᠴᠤ


Right-to-Left (bdo tag):

ᠮᠠᠨᠴᠤ


Right-to-Left (RLO/PDF):

‮ᠮᠠᠨᠴᠤ‬


Vertical:

ᠮᠠᠨᠴᠤ


Vertical Multi-Line:


4ᠮᠠᠨᠴᠤ
3ᠮᠠᠨᠴᠤ
2ᠮᠠᠨᠴᠤ
1ᠮᠠᠨᠴᠤ
Graphic of text:


What it should really look like:


References:

"Traditional Mongolian Script in the ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode Standards" by Myatav Erdenechimeg, Richard Moore and Yumbayar Namsrai (.ps)

"Traditional Mongolian Script in the ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode Standards" by Myatav Erdenechimeg, Richard Moore and Yumbayar Namsrai (.pdf)

Unicode: "Standardized Variants"

Mac Fonts (included in OS X 10.2): STFangsong, STHeiti, STKaiti, STSong
Windows Font: SimSun-18030

XSL
CSS3
S. Zilles: Internationalized Text Formatting in CSS and XSL

Mongolian Unicode Range

Mac OS X 10.2 Manchu Unicode Keyboard