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A strange questions bugs me regularly... Should I use the top right corner or the top left corner? I reckon Japanese use the top right, but we often do otherwise here, and then I start thinking about the direction of reading vs. the direction of turning the pages... It might not matter for many things, but sometimes I wish there were a gold standard in diagram alignment.
Jamie: It is proper etiquette for the first play to be in the top right quadrant and in the bottom half "triangle".
There is no "etiquette" as to where the first move should be played. There may be a custom regarding Black's upper right corner but it is perfectly fine to play anywhere you like.
Please note that is not the subject here. Tapir is asking about diagrams.
Oops! Thanks for straightening me out :) In Japan the game recorder records the game from a certain perspective and the published diagrams come from the game recorder's record which leads to a certain uniformity. I think database programs for game or position searces look at positions taking into account symmetries such as viewing perspective. And ideally so should we when searching our own memories, so how the diagrams are oriented shouldn't matter should it?
This thread is quite old. The question occurred to me while editing joseki pages (especially index pages when some lower level pages where top right and others top left oriented). I settled for top left oriented and even went out of my way to reorient some top level joseki pages. The edit window offers a top left corner for copy&paste after all and English is written from left to right ...
Japanese joseki dictionaries seem to be consistently upper right. However, tsumego, tesuji, life and death books are a mixed bag: upper right, lower right, and lower left (I have examples of all these). The one thing I could not find with a quick look through twenty books or so was upper left! :-) One more thing that isn't worth losing sleep over IMHO.