Quote:
Originally Posted by radius
If you guys look here:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/09/11/c...-e-ink-reader/
You can see a picture of a propsective reader to be sold by China Mobile.
In the fifth line of text, you can see that they dropped the last character so that the next line would not start with a comma... |
Of course there are some folks here who are anti-PRC and anti-simplified Chinese, so your example might not be useful (to them, the rest of us like it fine
)
I've found samples of all 4 primary methods of using punctuation in Chinese traditional text.
If you can read Chinese,
this is a fairly interesting discussion on it.
This blog post has some photo examples of shifts over time and some commentary on the flexibility of rules and a brief dismissal of Word for typesetting.
This blog post from a while ago just offers a link I already posted, but there are other posts that might be interesting too.
As a former student of Chinese literature, I don't see any special grace in grid adherence excepting literary forms that call for consistent patterns like poetry. I think line length considerations, vertical/horizontal orientation, and perhaps even the typeface used will influence a decision on it. With the pathetic ebook reader screens we have, I think a 6" reader would not do very well with hanging punctuation (too much white space relative to the screen), and I find it horribly jarring to start with a stop (or stop with a start). Hanging punctuation can work really quite well if there is adequate line length and a healthy margin (especially if the punctuation mark is set to the left or top, minimizing overhang); grid-defying justification is probably best in most reading situations. Early breaking isn't too bad an alternative though.
And a note: Justification seems to keep grid in all lines excepting those with offending characters; and with good leading, the sense of grid contrivance you get with a lot of older stuff is left behind pretty well, and you can follow the line smoothly without noticing whether it's matched up with the line next to it.