Re: Japanese line breaks (was: interleaved ordering)

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon May 10 2004 - 18:01:53 CDT

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    From: "Stefan Persson" <alsjebegrijptwatikbedoel@yahoo.se>
    > In Japanese you can put a line break between *any* characer, except
    > before punctuation & end quote or after start quote.

    Are you SURE of that? I had many negative comments about undesirable line breaks
    in the middle of what is perceived as a single word, and where a single Kana
    moved to the next line was seen as bad, notably when it is a particle.
    I had similar comments from Korean users with Hangul.

    OK the traditional writing rules will allow putting breaks everywhere so that
    characters will line up equally in a grid, that would fill all free space in
    paper rolls, but today, with mixed use of half-width/full-width, mixed scripts,
    mixed font sizes or styles, etc... this traditional usage does not seem
    tolerable as it would be hard to read. Japense users are now adpt of
    fast-reading technics, and breaking some words or concepts to the next line does
    not ease the understanding of text.

    Users today want better "hyphenation" of text (bad term because they don't use
    hyphens to mark it...), and they want style on it. Most commercial Asian
    websites are very colorful, and use many font sizes and styles, much more often
    than on European/American websites which look so "monotonous" for them...

    We don't perceive the same idea of what is "ugly" such as "patchworked" colors.
    Asian text is generally better shown with carefully chosen layouts so that words
    will be placed according to their meaning and relation). Web design in Japan is
    extremely creative. And there's a strong tradition in graphic arts.



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