[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