It's only easy if the system forbids everything that would make calculating visible length hard, which I think constitutes extremely poor library support. I want to see the monospaced system that can correctly print Mongolian: ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ If properly implemented, it should join the characters and display them vertically. But your browser is probably showing them horizontally right now, because support for vertical writing is seriously broken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_script#Font_issues