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Comment by Brosper | Hacker News Reader

As a web developer I reject that change :P

Seriously? As a web developer, you already have all the tools needed to work with this change should you ever find yourself needing to build a Mongolian website. We live in world that has Unicode, wide dispersal of compatible fonts, CSS text-orientation rules with decent browser compatibility, etc etc.

> CSS text-orientation rules with decent browser compatibility

I don't think the support is really there for vertical writing systems.

I think we can say it is. writing-mode in particular has full support in all modern browsers, and some support in IE back to version 6: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-writing-mode

In theory, yes, in practice (I speak from experience) it has a massive amount of bugs when you actually try to use it for something that is not completely trivial. And the bugs are different for every browser, so working around them is pretty much intractable.

Posted earlier in the discussion, the Mongolian President's website works well for me, in Firefox on Linux.

The mouse scroll scrolls right, selecting text works (with a horizontal cursor), the western text (dates, numbers and "Covid-19") embedded in the text are appropriately rotated.

"View source" shows the source text, and it doesn't look like there are any nasty tricks to support this.

Is anything missing?

https://president.mn/mng/

For me, the mouse scroll doesn't work unless I enable Javascript for the site (I run NoScript). So, at least that aspect seems to be reliant on some kind of JS-based workaround, not CSS itself.

It's not as convenient, but you can always scroll horizontally with shift.

> wide dispersal of compatible fonts

Would you please share a link where I can download Mongolian Helvetica?

Why would you need a specific typeface? Your goal is to get characters displaying to the user rather than tofu.

Having said that, the place to look for multiscript support in Helvetica would be Linotype’s Neue Helvetica World: https://www.linotype.com/5553118/neue-helvetica-world-family... . Unfortunately, while they currently support 103 languages, Mongolian isn’t among them. I guess if this restoration takes off it might become part of the next release.

Why? If you were designing a website with Mongolian as a language option you would choose a font that has support for Mongolian, not something completely unsuitable like Helvetica. The same goes for any language not written with a Latin alphabet.

If you don't want to provide a font and just want whatever passes for sans-serif on a computer with Mongolian fonts installed, use font-family: sans-serif; in your CSS and let the OS handle it.

Sure, I can go with font-family: sans-serif But what if I have to add Mongolian support for a website using Helvetica typeface for the currently used Cyrillic script?

You can't, but this is nothing new. Fonts tend to support a subset of scripts. You just got lucky with Cyrillic that a Helvetica version supporting it exists.

Here you would choose a Mongolian font and add it to the font-stack in CSS for that language, just as you would for Arabic or Chinese. If you want a grotesque typeface that matches Helvetica in style for Mongolian, use one.

> You just got lucky with Cyrillic that a Helvetica version supporting it exists.

This is hardly a coincedence that Cyrillic alphabet has broader support and adoption among fonts.

Google's Noto project has a decent sans-serif Mongolian script typeface (https://www.google.com/get/noto/#sans-mong) that is pre-installed on newer Android and iOS devices.

The real challenge would be to design a multi-lingual website for both vertical and horizontal scripts. I suspect you'd end up with two very different designs.

It's interesting to look at the Mongolian president's web page (https://president.mn/mng/): It scrolls horizontally. And see how it responds to the hamburger menu, for example.

Edit: Oh wait, the president's web page is itself a good example: Here is the English version (https://president.mn/en/).

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