Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
Thanks, LDBoblo! That's great.
I'm not particularly enamoured with any of the solutions... I wonder if line-starting punctuation would seem/feel less wrong, if it was not so visually distinct both in Western and Chinese writing systems.
e.g.: If the comma character was "氷"... (I know it already has a meaning, but obviously I cannot very well input an as yet non-existent CJK character.) Perhaps in writing where words are already not separated, the sometimes (from a western typographic perspective) unorthodox placement of it at the beginning of a line would not be too jarring... as Eric's comments already suggest. And given that the character does not look strikingly different from other Hanzi characters, there would be no visual jarring either.
Note: I'm not suggesting this is how Chinese should be written. I'm now proposing a pure thought experiment... primarily to LDBoblo, but happily enough to anyone else who'd like to share their opinion.
- Ahi
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I'm offline in just a bit but I think that since punctuation itself has a bit of semantic value (though perhaps a dependent one), it would still be uncomfortable to allow punctuation to start/stop lines...not just visually but perhaps syntactically as well.
In most of my Chinese books, the line length is great enough to allow flexible spacing for justification (between characters) without being overly obvious as my pdf examples were. Admittedly, most are also vertically typeset. I'll look about next chance I get to find some properly horizontally set materials. Do you have in mind literature formatting or are you thinking of more compact stuff?