Spaces and full width punctuation in Korean

Hi Richard,

We're looking into https://drafts.csswg.org/css-text-3/#line-break-transform, and particularly Murakami-san's suggestion (https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/5086#issue-621170190) that we may be able to aggressively discard source-code line-breaks right before/after certain punctuation marks, regardless of what's on the other side. He's suggestion seems good to us as far as Japanese is concerned, but we were wondering about Korean, due to its use of U+0020 for word separation, possibly combined with some amount of traditional CJK punctuation.

Specifically, we're wondering whether:
    * any full-width punctuation (from CJK Symbols and Punctuation) is used in modern Korean
    * if so, whether they're used adjacent to U+0020 spaces that are expected to be preserved

As far as we can tell, even if most punctuation used is the common latin script stuff, there is some usage of full width ones, with some variation between North and South Korea. Wikipedia claims the following may be in some degree of use: 〜『』「」《》

As 〜 is used as a range separator, and isn't expected to be next to a space, so we should be good.

『』「」《》all include a half-blank in the character itself, so we suspect that when used in Korean text, even text that normally uses U+0020, no such additional space is need next to them. But it would be good to confirm.

Similarly, the traditional 、and 。probably aren't used in modern text, but even if they were, they typically include enough built-in spacing that an additional U+0020 would not be be needed. Same goes for ：；！？・

With all that in mind, it looks like what we want to do is fine, but it would be good confirm with people who actually know about Korean typography, in case, for example, Korean fonts don't include the extra space in the glyphs and do require the use of adjacent U+0020.

Thanks,
–f&F

Received on Tuesday, 29 September 2020 04:23:17 UTC