Modest proposal

[ewx]

kernel.org is currently upside-down. (Screenshot for when they turn it back upright.) The implementation is a bit of a hack, using Unicode characters that resemble the rotated form of the intended Roman letters.

To allow the same effect less hackily, a colleague and I propose a new Unicode code point: COMBINING 15° CLOCKWISE ROTATION.

The effect of this would be that the base character and all combining characters preceding it were rotated about the center of the base character. Of course, you could continue with further combining characters, including further rotations.

The normalization algorithms would of course require updating to cope with the unusual properties of this new combining character. At the moment if you have two combiners of different classes they can be re-ordered without any visible change, but this would no longer be the case.

As an optimization, additional rotations could be included, for instance 15° anticlockwise or 90° clockwise. Obviously there would need to be associated canonicalization rules.

Comments

[simont]

Bah. Anticlockwise is the One True Positive Direction of Rotation.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

It could be anticlockwise instead, I'm not fussed l-)

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

ITYM "burn the heretic!", surely?

[gerald_duck]

On a spit. Rotating in the correct direction.

(And then we can have another holy war about which is the canonical end from which to view the spit's rotation.)

[emperor]

YKINMK

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I have too many friends (ie. any) who would respond "clockwise looking from the FRONT of the page, or the back?" :( :)

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

CSS is the way to go, rather than Unicode hackery:

Safari, Chrome: -webkit-transform: rotate(180deg);
Firefox: -moz-transform: rotate(180deg);
Opera 10.50: -o-transform: rotate(180deg);

(It'll be standardized at some point, I expect.)

[cjwatson]

Embrace the power of and!

[bjh21.livejournal.com]

I feel that 15° is silly – the main purpose of this is to emulate printers' turning their type around to get new characters, and type is rectilinear. Also, ISO would never countenance using a non-SI unit in the name of a character. Finally, Simon is obviously correct, so COMBINING HALF PI RADIAN ROTATION COUNTERCLOCKWISE.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Surely the question to ask is "should this be considered part of the text, or part of the markup"? But wouldn't it actually be (occasionally) useful as part of the text? It'd be annoying to implement and I'm sure no-one would, but assuming you used a more sensible unit of rotation, wouldn't it actually make a small amount of sense? :)