Re: Justification in Arabic, Korean

Martin Duerst wrote:
> 
> At 06:55 06/03/13, fantasai wrote:
>  >
>  >CCing i18n people in case they have input...
>  >
>  >Paul Nelson (ATC) wrote:
>  >
>  > >
>  > > 1. Korean typography ... not as ideographic.
> 
> The few books I have here (mostly on lettering, dated in the 1980es)
> have spaces between words, but they also use what one might call
> ideographic line breaking (breaking at any point between two
> characters (except for certain exceptions such as before punctuation,...).
> Inter-letter spacing didn't seem to occur. The spaces were about
> half the size of a Hangul character, in one book considerably
> smaller. There were usually enough spaces on a line, and because
> a word can be broken everywhere, the problem of wide white spaces,
> as one can often see it in narrow columns in western languages,
> didn't show up.
> 
> There were a few examples of Latin words in Korean, but mostly,
> these were just single words, and often with a Korean ending
> attached, without a space. Hanja also showed up, but mostly
> just one or two, in parentheses. That was the case that most
> often lead to expanded inter-word space, because breaking
> lines just inside parentheses is disallowed.
> 
> 
>  >If we can't find ... two cases it matches.
> 
> The big problem with things like this is that these cases are rare,
> and therefore typographic practice isn't very well established, and
> one or the other typographic practice often dominates in a mixed
> script situation, due to the typographer not knowing enough of
> the other script's practice, because of technology limitations,
> or because of a concious decision to not mix practices.
> 
> One other point: According to JIS X 4051, justification in Japanese
> text is first done in the 'space' after punctuations before using
> true inter-ideographic spacing. For its description, JIS X 4051
> actually describes full-width punctuation marks such as 、and 。
> as consisting of a half-width glyph and a half-width space.

Ok, thanks for the information. :)

>  > > 2. Yes. There is a need for Newspaper style justification that 
> stretches
>  > > Arabic scripts evenly. This is used with Arabic and Uighur.
>  >
>  >And this definitely
>  >   - expands just the connections like lam-reh, not the disconnected
>  >     sequences like reh-lam?
>  >   - takes precedence over stretching word spaces?
> 
> For the examples I seem to remember, definitely yes on both accounts.
> What I seem to remember from explanations is that there are specific
> points in a word where the stretching is done, not every connection
> is used. This is what the kashida/tatweel character in Unicode is
> there for, to indicate these stretching points.

In this case Paul and I were discussing whether, in addition to kashida,
which has prescribed rules for where and how much to elongate the
connections, whether we needed an additional justification method that
stretched Arabic evenly at all connection points.

>  > > 3. I have not had time yet to contact Chinese type people. This 
> week or
>  > >    next week I may have a chance.
>  >
>  >Ok. Feel free to ask them about my scans. :)
>  >   http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/discuss/emphasis-marks/
>  >I wish I could find that book with x-shaped marks...
> 
> I can remember having seen some of these, but I have no clue where
> that was (but it was probably a Japanese context).
> 
> If I have a chance, I might have a look at some University
> entrance examination problem collections. These are the
> cases where typography goes farthest in terms of things
> like double underlining with different styles, various kinds
> of marks, and so on.

Linguistics journals are also good. :) I have a stack of photocopies
I made on Monday, I haven't scanned them in yet, though.

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 15 March 2006 13:43:53 UTC