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.:
Quote:
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。
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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