Re: Korean Hangul-only traditional layout?

On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 6:05 AM, Koji Ishii <kojiishi@gluesoft.co.jp> wrote:
> I was reading KLREQ[1] and have got a fundamental (I think) question.
>
> In my understanding, there are 3 types of Korean documents:
> 1. Hangul-only (with Latin mixed) documents.
> 2. Hangul + some Han, with Latin mixed documents.
> 3. Han-only (sometimes with a few Hangul) documents.
>
> >From layout characteristic perspective, #1 and #2 are similar to Latin; words are split by spaces, though there’s a stylistic variation to allow line breaks at any character boundaries.
>
> #3 is different from these two in that it’s closer to Chinese; such documents do not use spaces to delimit words, and they always allow line breaks at any character boundaries.
>
> When I was reading KLREQ, I found some examples such as pictures in [2] or [3] that consist of only Hangul characters, but I can’t find any spaces to delimit words in these examples.
>
> What typographic characteristics do these documents have? Should they be layout like traditional Korean documents (i.e., Chinese documents,) such as expanding between any letters when justified?
>
> Currently, based on the understanding I mentioned at the top of this e-mail, the CSS WG thinks Korean authors can use #1/#2 layout with lang=“ko”, and can switch to #3 by specifying lang=“ko-hani”. If there were documents that consist of only (or-mostly) Hangul but have Chinese-like layout, this idea may not be great.
>
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/klreq/
> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/klreq/#para-writingdirection
> [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/klreq/#line-head-indent

Weird, I've never seen Korean written without spaces; they form words
identically to Latin scripts, so I don't understand why the examples
wouldn't have them.

(Also, the example in [2] has "vertical" and "horizontal" switched.
And figure 17, immediately following it, has arrows running the wrong
directions, indicating vertical text when the underlying picture
clearly shows horizontal text.)

~TJ

Received on Monday, 27 October 2014 14:57:57 UTC