Guide
Vertical text, set the way it’s read.
Vertical Japanese and Chinese expose weak reading systems: columns run the wrong way, or the ruby disappears. Tomelet renders 縦書き, ruby and the correct right-to-left column progression from the same engine that lays out every other book.
Part of the free reader — no separate mode to switch on.
Why vertical text breaks in many readers
Vertical writing is not rotated horizontal text. Lines stack from top to bottom, columns advance from right to left, and ruby annotations sit alongside the characters they describe.
Readers that treat vertical text as an afterthought often turn a page on its side, strip the ruby, or run the columns the wrong way — small errors that make a page hard to read for the people it was written for.
What correct looks like
Line and column flow
Text reads top to bottom, and columns progress from right to left, so the book turns the way it should.
Ruby (furigana)
Pronunciation guides stay attached to their characters instead of dropping out or overlapping.
Right-to-left too
The same engine lays out Arabic and Hebrew right to left, and sorts each language’s text by its own rules.
What Tomelet supports
Vertical Japanese and Chinese, ruby and right-to-left scripts are handled by Tomelet’s one reading engine — the same one that keeps a publisher’s fonts and paginates every other book. There is no separate, lower-quality path for CJK or RTL.
FAQ
Questions & answers
Does Tomelet support ruby (furigana)?
Yes. Ruby annotations stay attached to their base characters in both vertical and horizontal text.
Can it read vertical Chinese as well as Japanese?
Yes. Vertical writing with right-to-left column progression is rendered for both, from the same engine.
What about right-to-left languages like Arabic?
Right-to-left layout and per-language sorting are handled by the same engine, so Arabic and Hebrew books read correctly too.