Re: Justification of Chinese text

Hi Martin,

I should say I'm not an expert on this. It had never occurred to me that
Chinese writers would want justification, since Chinese mostly lays out
on a completely regular grid with the same no. of chars per line.
However, the requirement that you can never start a line with ",",")" etc.
and the inclusion of English words, which can't be split, means that
occasionally you'll have a line with fewer characters.

According to Zhang xiansheng the correct behaviour is to space the chars
evenly across the line.

> so instead of this:
> |--------------------|
> Iliketotype
>
> You have this:
> |--------------------|
> I l i k e t o t y p e

That's right.

> If this is what is wanted, should we just place the caret at the
> right-most edge of the column and fill to the left with characters?

I don't quite understand. Is the caret a text pointer used internally
in abi to layout characters?

Would it be possible to somehow implicitly "insert" zero width spaces
between Chinese characters? Then the current layout engine would do the
right thing (I think).

Best wishes,

R.
Received on Fri Apr 1 18:31:02 2005