Quote:
Originally Posted by ericshliao
I would assert that such rule, if there is any, must exists in professions of journalist or publication. That's not what I know of. But even if such rule does exists, I can say for sure that it's not commonly accepted.
BTW, I don't know the reason why punctuation should not start from the start of a line, both for English and for Chinese. Any explanation?
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Bookmaking is the field of the publisher. There are typography rules that govern text layout and alignment in virtually all formally written and published languages. Such typographic rules are predominantly to aid reading cohesion. Beginning a freshly broken line (not a new paragraph or sentence) with punctuation is a terribly inefficient method of reading that can adversely affect cognition. Virtually all word processors include basic spatial formatting rules to ensure that a stop or a comma for instance will not start a line, or that an opening parenthesis will not be the the final character on a line. That goes for Chinese as well.
They do not tell you when you write an English essay either that you do not start a line with a period. Ahi is not asking about the rules of
basic writing (including what you find in style guides for dissertation writing--and I've read my share of Chinese dissertations, most of which are pretty pathetic), but those of typography. Outside a publishing house (excluding the crappy independent publishers that you find affiliated with schools, for instance), relatively few people learn a lot about paragraph typography, so it's not exactly surprising if the "average" Taiwanese and Chinese don't know much about it. Most Americans and English won't know much about English typography either. Laymen are not expected to know it, so Ahi's question was directed to the possible few that may be aware of the rules, not Chinese laymen.