Abstract—Even as of 2024, the support of Far Eastern writing systems by computers remains uneven, to say the least. For example, vertical right-to-left user interfaces, as it could naturally be expected in countries like Japan and China, are extremely rare. In fact, it is the opposite that has been happening since the broad adoption of computer systems: people of these cultures have got accustomed to western, left-to-right horizontal interfaces. In previous research, we have started to technically investigate the current situation in the case of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI); the results obtained showed that although noticeable improvements have been made, the support provided by current technologies (e.g., operating system features, browser features) in the realisation of Far Eastern interfaces is still nowhere near that of western ones. In this paper, we propose and evaluate an extension to the Console User Interface (CUI) to improve its support of Far Eastern writing systems. Concretely, the vertical right-to-left application scenario is considered for the CUI. The measured results are positive in that they match those obtained in the case of the conventional, left-to-right horizontal layout. Precisely, our proposal is slightly faster when it comes to the text scrolling speed (between 3% and 9% in our experiments).
 
Keywords—cultural heritage, writing system, Chinese, Japanese, Korean (CJK), vertical, Right-to-Left (RTL), kanji, hanzi, hanja


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