Re: Intermixed Hangul in Japanese // 日本語と韓国文字の行の調整処理

I got further clarifications from Kobayashi-sensei outside the ML, so I’m translating that here with his approval.

In short, if we want prioritized spacing, one possible idea is to set 3 priorities: give the largest spacing to Kana, the next to Kanji, and the smallest to space characters (Latin/Koeran.) This is opposite from what currently proposed to make Korean better (more spacing to Latin/Korean,) so IIUC, he confirmed that C/J and K justification conflicts.

TL;DR, my try to translate directly (I didn’t understand all of them and this is almost direct translations, so be prepared that I may did some wrong translations):

First of all, expanding spaces should be done at least visible points. Word boundaries of Latin have less opportunities than character boundaries of Japanese, so it should be avoided as much as possible, only as the last resort.

There are other reasons to avoid expanding Latin word boundaries. In Latin, letter spacing is more often used for emphasis purposes than it is in Japanese. So extra spacing within Latin context should be avoided to make the differences of justifications and other purposes (emphasis) clearer.

Next, visual is quite important when you justify. The goal is to build a visual that does not to misread, not to give wrong impressions, and is least visible.

We could consider Kanji and Kana has fundamental differences in how their glyphs are designed. Kanji usually consumes more spaces within the em-box than Kana does.

In general, important characters (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) use Kanji, while additional characters (postfixes, particle, etc.) use Kana.

With the design of Kanji larger than Kana, one could read Kanji-only by skipping Kana, and still understand what the text is saying. I actually use this method when I want to read something very quickly.

In such fonts, one may think it’s better to expand where more crowded so that all spaces be similar, but my experience tells me the opposite. When there are less spaces between Kanji and more spaces, expanding between Kana is less visible. This is explained as, expanding where there are little spaces is visible, while expanding where there are some spaces is less visible.

Spacing between letters in Latin is very important. Expanding them even slightly is very noticeable. I think this proves that, expanding between word is also more noticeable than expanding between Japanese characters.

From these considerations, it’s possible to set priorities between Kana, then between Kanji.

InDesign, and in old days, SAPCOL from Shaken corp. can set different priorities for Kanji and Kana.

By considering this, whether to expand between Hangul or not is more related with how Hangul is used than to how Japanese is used. If they want to avoid letter spacing between Hangul, I guess it must be similar to Latin. I’m not sure how much Korean thinks expansion of Hangul word boundaries should be avoided, but how much it should be avoided within Japanese context should follow that Korean thinks it should be avoided in Korean context.

Note that Kanbun (i.e., what traditional Korean is similar to) is defined in JIS X 4051. I tried a bit in JLREQ, but its translation was so hard that I gave up. In JIS X 4051, expansion between Han characters within Kanbun context is allowed.


On Oct 23, 2014, at 5:52 AM, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:

> Hello JLTF!
> I have a question about Japanese justification practices.
> We have a lot of information in JLREQ about handling of
> Kanji, Kana, Latin, and various punctuation. This takes
> care of mixing Japanese with European-language writing
> systems and Chinese-language writing systems. My question
> is about Korean, if Hangul is included in a Japanese
> document, is it justified as Kanji/Kana or is it justified
> as Latin?
> 
> For example, given the sentence
>  0. 김형수は艾俐俐と中国で勉強しました。
> is it correct to justify as
>  1. 김형수 は 艾 俐 俐 と 中 国 で 勉 強 し ま し た。
> or
>  2. 김 형 수 は 艾 俐 俐 と 中 国 で 勉 強 し ま し た。
> ?
> 
> Thank you!
> 
> 韓国語の文字が日本語のページにあるは、行の調整処理の時どれがいいですか
> 
>  1. 김형수 は 艾 俐 俐 と 中 国 で 勉 強 し ま し た。
>  2. 김 형 수 は 艾 俐 俐 と 中 国 で 勉 強 し ま し た。
>  3. #1がいい、＃２もいい。
> 
> (Sorry for the (probably) non-grammatical Japanese, hopefully
> it is nonetheless understandable.)
> 
> ありがとうございます！！
> 
> ~fantasai
>

Received on Monday, 27 October 2014 10:40:44 UTC