Quote:
Originally Posted by herbalist
Well, is your copy of Louis Cha’s novel layout in a grid? Or is the spacing between the characters adjusted ever so imperceptably?
So the Chinese government actually promulgated a set of rules regarding published books in mainland China? That’s a law, not grammatical rules. In Hong Kong, we used to write our essays on grid papers, if starting the next line is a “,” or a “:”, I will put in the punctuation mark and not omit a space or two just to make sure that comma or colon does not occupy the start of a line. If however, I’ve forgotten to use the squiggly to underline book names or start a new paragraph, I would not be punctuating correctly. If I publish a book in China without following their rules, I probably ran afoul of their law but I still haven't committed any grammatical errors.
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The text of those books is fully-justified with variable spaces, though imperceptible, between characters. They are typeset by hand so I think it won't take too much more time to do that. But in a computerized world, if your word processor or ebook reader (like Sony's LRF renderer) doesn't support it, there won't be too much one can do.
I think the gridded papers you mentioned are mainly used by Chinese students or writers so that their teachers or editors can count the number of characters written easily. But usually they won't be the final product.
I am afraid these are more like grammatical rules than law and I can't imagine the PRC Government will punish you for violating them. But since there are specific rules set by the Government, most people will obey.
I think most governments won't bother to set rules in that microscopic level. I guess, say in western countries, not starting a line with a comma etc is like a tradition or a consensus.