Chinese Typography

[ahi]

I would like to inquire from any Chinese mobileread members, about a certain aspect of Chinese typography.

Given that characters are all the same width and are supposed to form an orderly grid (with characters aligned both vertically and horizontally), how is the problem of punctuation ending up as the first character of a line solved?

e.g.:

故曰：知彼知己，百戰不殆；不知彼而知己，
一勝一負；不知彼，不知己，每戰必殆。故曰
：知彼知己，百战不殆；不知彼而知己，一胜
一负；不知彼，不知己，每战必殆。

The third line is presumably incorrect, on account of the colon being the first item on the line. Given that, unlike in western typography, Chinese characters cannot be spaced differently from line to line to change what overflows in the next line of the paragraph; how is this sort of problem resolved?

Obviously, I could change the number-of-characters width of the paragraph. But is this the only way? Do people that typeset newspapers keep experiment, randomly changing the character-width of articles until all paragraphs are clean of line-starting punctuation?

What about books? Presumably the paragraphs of books (when using horizontal writing) must all be the same number-of-characters wide... at least on a per-page basis. Is changing the number-of-characters width really the only way to prevent line-starting punctuation? Or are there some others ways that are used?

Thanks in advance!

- Ahi

[HarryT]

Moved at the poster's request.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Moved at the poster's request.

Thanks!

[radius]

Originally Posted by ahi

Given that characters are all the same width and are supposed to form an orderly grid (with characters aligned both vertically and horizontally), how is the problem of punctuation ending up as the first character of a line solved?

People don't usually expect text to be laid out in a grid. Think how hard that would be to read in real life. You can vary inter-word spacing just like for Latin-based languages.

I'm not sure where you live, but the easiest thing to do is go to your local Chinatown and take a look at a Chinese language newspaper...

[ahi]

Originally Posted by radius

People don't usually expect text to be laid out in a grid. Think how hard that would be to read in real life. You can vary inter-word spacing just like for Latin-based languages.

I'm not sure where you live, but the easiest thing to do is go to your local Chinatown and take a look at a Chinese language newspaper...

Hmmm... that's what I did. And it seemed to me all articles were, in fact, laid out as a grid. I guess I'll take a closer look...

But even on news.cn, articles seem to adhere to the grid--excepting the fact that paragraphs' first-line-indentation misaligns the first line just slightly. Otherwise, all subsequent lines in a paragraph have their characters perfectly aligned under the corresponding character in the line above and/or below.

See attached.

- Ahi

[ahi]

Though, actually, I notice that the penultimate line in my screen capture ends a character early, in order to not have the comma be the first character on the last line.

Maybe this is a solution unique to HTML though?

- Ahi

[Jellby]

So, you are taking HTML rendering as a typography model?

Try to search for PDFs instead, preferably those scanned from decently typeset publications (i.e., not PDFs generated by Word-like software).

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Jellby

So, you are taking HTML rendering as a typography model?

No, hence my noting (perhaps in insufficient detail) that I did not think blatantly breaking the justification by simply shoving a character to the next line and leaving a gap at the line's end is probably the HTML solution, not the typographically correct one.

Originally Posted by Jellby

Try to search for PDFs instead, preferably those scanned from decently typeset publications (i.e., not PDFs generated by Word-like software).

As noted before, my present observations come from printed media, a large-ish newspaper. If need be I will go to the library and look at some books... but my inquiry is meant to elicit some explanation from a more reliable source than my piecing together a theory of Chinese typography based on a handful of books that I happen to be able to readily get my hands on.

- Ahi

[Jellby]

Until someone more knowledgeable in Chinese typesetting comes about, we can only speculate.

To add to the speculation, you could have a look at this PDF from the ConTeXt team, dealing with Chinese typesetting. The examples shown are not typeset in a grid.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Until someone more knowledgeable in Chinese typesetting comes about, we can only speculate.

To add to the speculation, you could have a look at this PDF from the ConTeXt team, dealing with Chinese typesetting. The examples shown are not typeset in a grid.

Interesting. Thanks for that!

There is some strangeness with punctuation, where certain punctuation juxtaposed only takes up a single character width instead of two. Also, line-final commas (maybe other punctuation too) can be (or are supposed to be?) half-width only.

Factors that, thinking about it, would make maintaining the grid difficult to impossible. So perhaps the presence of grids is merely indicative of poor quality/simplistic Chinese type-setting software?

- Ahi

[ahi]

Now I'm starting to wonder whether maybe I'm wrong about the newspaper being in a grid? Perhaps my eyes/mind is tricked into assuming so by the left side and right side being aligned, but not the middle.

Doubtless I am less perceptive about typographic conceptions used with a script that I cannot interpret/read.

- Ahi

[herbalist]

hi, modern Chinese books are never really laid out in a grid. This use to be true of old printed books and before the introduction of punctuations. Traditional Chinese are laid out vertically from right to left. You can check out many example using google books. You may encounter samples that are lay out in a grid - that's because before the introduction of computer typesetting and it is done using lead printing blocks.

[ericshliao]

Why do you want to prevent "line-starting punctuation"? I live in a place where Traditon Chinese is native and it seems that we don't care about the issue. I don't remember there is such rule to avoid "line-starting punctuation".
I can't say if there is no such rule for sure, but in reality, we don't care about it.
As to glyph width, to be honest, I don't quite understand your question. Ideally, each glyph, including punctuation, should be the same width, but modern font rendering tech on computer can make some minor space shifting if proper font is provided.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by herbalist

hi, modern Chinese books are never really laid out in a grid. This use to be true of old printed books and before the introduction of punctuations. Traditional Chinese are laid out vertically from right to left. You can check out many example using google books. You may encounter samples that are lay out in a grid - that's because before the introduction of computer typesetting and it is done using lead printing blocks.

So... is horizontal writing with a rigid grid seen as an aesthetic positive that makes text look "old" or "classical"? Or is it seen as undesirable and simplistic to the detriment of the text?

Originally Posted by ericshliao

Why do you want to prevent "line-starting punctuation"? I live in a place where Traditon Chinese is native and it seems that we don't care about the issue. I don't remember there is such rule to avoid "line-starting punctuation".
I can't say if there is no such rule for sure, but in reality, we don't care about it.

I guess I assumed there was such a rule, because in the fairly large newspaper I checked out, I did not find a single instance of it. I suppose perhaps this might have been a coincidence...

Originally Posted by ericshliao

As to glyph width, to be honest, I don't quite understand your question. Ideally, each glyph, including punctuation, should be the same width, but modern font rendering tech on computer can make some minor space shifting if proper font is provided.

I assumed that hanzi character paragraphs are supposed to be in a grid, and that different lines of the same paragraph cannot therefore have different amount of spacing between characters.

- Ahi

[ahi]

I am becoming increasingly more perplexed...

http://ask.metafilter.com/89557/Help...ese-typography

Chinese is not normally leaded or kerned. In traditional Chinese typography, text is laid out on a regular two-dimensional grid. All characters are assumed to be monospaced, and each occupies the center of its own box, which has certain top/bottom and left/right margins to the adjacent boxes.

Web typography is eurocentric—it makes no allowance for this approach to typography (I think—I've never seen any CSS documentation that relates to this). Of course, with InDesign, you can kern Chinese (the tool doesn't care how you use it), and I've seen it once in a while. It jumps off the page because it looks so weird.

- Ahi