Bug 443767

Just FYI: when it comes to video subtitles Korean is mostly written in horizontal. Just grab some YouTube videos and you will never see anything written in vertical. Subtitles in cinema is probably the last thing written in vertical, which is also moving to horizontal nowadays. I am not objecting in this feature request as vertical writing could be also used for retro theming for Korean language, but it is not frequently used as Chinese and Japanese. The linked two videos are Chinese (not sure about simplified or traditional) and Japanese respectively.

This isn't really something you're going to be able to do with subtitles.

For those we're constrained by what the subtitle formats themselves support,
and there is no option for vertical direction text that I'm aware of.  With ASS
you can rotate the text, but that's not the same since it also rotates the
glyphs as well as the text direction.

Probably all you can do if you really, really, want this, is to put an explicit
newline after each character you want stacked vertically.

Even with title clips, where we have a bit more control, I'm not sure Qt has
direct support for vertical text.  Is there an input method and text widget
which supports that for the languages which can be written this way?  Or
is what you want more in the realm of "graphic art" than it is "text support"?

(In reply to Ron from comment #2)
> This isn't really something you're going to be able to do with subtitles.
Yes, I know.

> For those we're constrained by what the subtitle formats themselves support,
> and there is no option for vertical direction text that I'm aware of.  With
> ASS
> you can rotate the text, but that's not the same since it also rotates the
> glyphs as well as the text direction.
So you're admit that Kdenlive doesn't support it at all. And you're right, this is not
the fancy option that just rotate texts in 90 degrees, or put newline between two
glyphs to make them looks vertically on screen (AFAIK, only few people really want
to do that). The proper visual apprearence of the vertical text layout are already 
documented by Unicode Consortium and W3C, as well as other official standards.

> Even with title clips, where we have a bit more control, I'm not sure Qt has
> direct support for vertical text.  Is there an input method and text widget
> which supports that for the languages which can be written this way?  Or
> is what you want more in the realm of "graphic art" than it is "text
> support"?
Me too, I don't know whether Qt can do for this. If Qt have no support for vertical
text, or there's something difficult to make use of, you have to write something new
or find out a library that could help.
This is independent of input method, something related to LTR or RTL text direction
may be the domain of OS, but not horizontal or vertical text, which is instead related 
to widget.
Anyway, this is not only "graphic art", but also "text support". Even if Adobe software
can do this for titles.
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-elements/using/creating-trimming-titles.html
If you got this text support, you'll pave the way do so for graphic art.

(In reply to Shinjo Park from comment #1)
> Just FYI: when it comes to video subtitles Korean is mostly written in
> horizontal. Just grab some YouTube videos and you will never see anything
> written in vertical. Subtitles in cinema is probably the last thing written
> in vertical, which is also moving to horizontal nowadays. I am not objecting
> in this feature request as vertical writing could be also used for retro
> theming for Korean language, but it is not frequently used as Chinese and
> Japanese. The linked two videos are Chinese (not sure about simplified or
> traditional) and Japanese respectively.
Yes, I know, Modern Korean mostly written horizontally on screen, it's hard to
found out such videos on the internet, it was deprecated for now.
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1VC4y1w7FZ/
But if one day people found out Kdenlive can do it, it's still possible that some
users want to try out in their videos, thus opened the way to do something
creative.

> The proper visual apprearence of the vertical text layout are already 
> documented by Unicode Consortium and W3C, as well as other official
> standards.

Which is nice, but if no player implements support for that in subtitles,
it's not of much practical use to us.

Can you point to a non-browser player that supports WebVTT vertical cues?
(or even a browser based one?).   Of the ones I'm seeing that support any
WebVTT cue properties at all, none implement the vertical property.

Right now, ASS subtitles are basically the sweet spot in the venn diagram for
feature richness and player support.  They aren't a perfect solution for every
use case, but they let you control more things, more portably in more players
on more platforms *today*.

It doesn't matter what we support if nothing that people try to play it in will
make it look like it did when they edited it.  We can't lead the players in this
or force them to implement it, we need to make things that they *can* play.

> If Qt have no support for vertical text, or there's something difficult to make use of,
> you have to write something new or find out a library that could help.

We don't *have* to do anything.  But kdenlive uses Qt for its UI, so that's
one more thing we're constrained by.  Another is that few fonts have
metrics for vertical text, so even if you did try to lay them out in that
direction, the result will still be indistinguishable from sticking a newline
between each character.

And no matter what we do there, it still doesn't make players support this
for subtitles.

> Anyway, this is not only "graphic art", but also "text support". Even if
> Adobe software can do this for titles.
> If you got this text support, you'll pave the way do so for graphic art.

You're missing my point, adobe isn't doing this for *subtitles* either.

And they are also individually placing individual characters in their more
'advanced' modes of text handling, not laying out text 'as text' according
to the metrics of the font designer.  Which totally falls in a heap in the
case of subtitles, where the player and/or its user can totally override
your choice of font and font size and colour and position, and just about
everything else.

This puts what adobe is doing in the realm is graphic art, and is something
in a long list of things that it would be nice for a future *title* tool to be
more powerful at enabling simply.

It's just never going to be possible with *subtitles*, sanely or at all, until
there's actually a widely supported and implemented mechanism for that.
And I'm not seeing that on any visible horizon right now.

"Titles" and subtitles are two quite different things.  With different uses and
and strengths and weaknesses.  They aren't interchangeable for every use
case just because they both can include 'text'.

So if you want to talk about things that it might be nice for a future *title* tool
to do, that's probably a good discussion to have in the open on the user forum
https://discuss.kde.org/tag/kdenlive/l/latest
to refine a sense of exactly what people might really want from it and have a
real use for, to guide its design.  That's fertile ground to grow feature requests
in.

But if you want to insist we do this with *subtitles*, then for the currently
foreseeable future it's probably a "can't fix" problem.  Because it's not about
whether kdenlive "supports it", it's about whether any player can play it.

🐛🧹 ⚠️ This bug has been in NEEDSINFO status with no change for at least 15 days. Please provide the requested information, then set the bug status to REPORTED. If there is no change for at least 30 days, it will be automatically closed as RESOLVED WORKSFORME.

For more information about our bug triaging procedures, please read https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Bug_triaging.

Thank you for helping us make KDE software even better for everyone!

🐛🧹 This bug has been in NEEDSINFO status with no change for at least 30 days. Closing as RESOLVED WORKSFORME.