Glossing guide
Aligning vertical writing systems
Two worked examples follow this guide: a Japanese sentence in tategaki with an English translation, and a traditional Mongolian phrase with a transliteration tier. Open either one to see the finished result before building your own.
When to use columns
Use column layout when the text you are aligning is genuinely written vertically: Japanese tategaki, classical and traditional Chinese, traditional Mongolian, Manchu, or Old Uyghur. A modern horizontal Japanese sentence does not need it. Neither does a gloss of a vertical text that you intend to print sideways.
The choice is per project, not per line. Every line in a diagram shares one direction, because a connector between two lines needs a single consistent gap to cross and the spacing between a pair of lines is one number. Within that shared direction, each line still decides how its own characters are set.
Turn on column layout
Open the Style tab. The first section is Layout. Set Direction to Columns.
The diagram turns a quarter turn: lines become columns standing side by side, words run down each column, and the connectors run sideways between columns. A list of your lines appears underneath, headed Stack characters. Tick the line whose script is written vertically.
Leave the translation line unticked. Its words then stay horizontal and sit one below another as whole boxes, which keeps them readable. Ticking a Latin line stacks it letter by letter, which is rarely what you want.
Stacked or rotated
Vertical scripts do not all behave the same way, so each line offers three settings. Open a line's own settings from the gear beside it in the preview, or from its card in the Text tab, and look for Text setting.
Upright
The default. Words render horizontally as usual. In column layout each word becomes an upright box and the boxes stack downward. This is what a translation, a gloss, or an IPA tier wants.
Vertical
Characters stack one under another inside each word box. This is correct for Japanese and Chinese, where every character occupies its own square and is drawn the same way in horizontal and vertical text. The Stack characters list in the Style tab is a shortcut to this setting.
Sideways
The whole line turns a quarter turn. Traditional Mongolian needs this: its letters join into a running vertical stem, and fonts for the script store the glyphs already rotated, expecting vertical layout to turn the line back. Stacking Mongolian character by character would break the joins.
Sideways also suits a Latin line that you want to read like the spine of a book, which is how long runs of Latin usually appear inside vertical Japanese text.
Mixing a vertical language with a horizontal one
A Japanese sentence and its English translation live in the same column diagram. The Japanese column stacks its characters. The English column keeps each word horizontal and stacks the words. Connectors run across between them, crossing wherever the word order differs.
You cannot give one line columns and another rows in the same diagram. Where you would want that, a gloss tier usually does the job: add a line, set it upright, and place it between the script and the translation.
Which column sits where
The first line sits leftmost, the same rule as rows where the first line sits topmost. There is no separate direction setting, because reordering the lines already does the job.
- Japanese and Chinese read their columns right to left, so put the translation first and the script second. The script then lands on the right, where a reader expects it.
- Traditional Mongolian reads its columns left to right, so the script line comes first and nothing needs reordering.
Reorder with the arrows beside each column in the preview, or by dragging the line cards in the Text tab.
Splitting text into words
Japanese and Chinese are written without spaces, and the tool never guesses word boundaries. You decide what counts as one alignment unit, either by typing spaces or by inserting the split character from the Tokens settings.
Splitting by grammatical unit usually reads best: keep a verb and its inflection together, and give particles their own box. A particle with no counterpart in the translation can simply stay unlinked, which shows the reader that the other language handles it some other way.
Export and share
PNG, SVG, PDF, and the self-contained HTML file all reproduce the column layout, including stacked and rotated text. A vertical diagram is tall, so the portrait and story presets in the Export tab fit it better than the wide ones.
The share link carries the direction and each line's text setting, so a link opens on someone else's screen exactly as you left it. Uploaded custom fonts are the one gap: their vertical forms are not yet shaped in PNG and PDF exports, so a custom font is safest with the Google Fonts option or with the SVG export.