Re: Korean Hangul-only traditional layout?

Original Message:
> 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.

These are bad examples, the text should have spaces. [3] written correctly should be [4], and I'm pretty sure that vertical layout in modern context has spacing. (Archaic documents do exist which have no spaces, e.g. hunminjeongeum eonhaebon [5])

There are some additional errors in KLREQ that never got addressed IIRC, so it's probably not the best idea to use KLREQ as a definitive reference.

> 
> 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

[4] http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/대한민국의_국가#.EA.B0.80.EC.82.AC
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum

Received on Monday, 27 October 2014 16:07:51 UTC