Line breaking rules in East Asian languages
The line breaking rules in East Asian languages specify how to wrap East Asian Language text such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Certain characters in those languages should not come at the end of a line, certain characters should not come at the start of a line, and some characters should never be split up across two lines. For example, periods and closing parentheses are not allowed to start a line. Many word processing and desktop publishing software products have built-in features to control line breaking rules in those languages.
In the Japanese language, especially, the categories of line breaking rules and processing methods are determined by the Japanese Industrial Standard JIS X 4051, and it is called Kinsoku Shori.
Line breaking rules in Chinese text
Line breaking rules for Chinese language have been described in the reference of Office Open XML, Ecma standard. There are rules about certain characters that are not allowed to start or end a line, such as below.Simplified Chinese
- Characters that are not allowed at the start of a line :
!%),.:;?]\
Traditional Chinese
- Characters that are not allowed at the start of a line :
!),.:;?]\
Line breaking rules in Japanese text (Kinsoku Shori)
Line breaking rules of Japanese language are determined by JIS X 4051, Japanese Industrial Standard. It describes word wrap rules and processing rules for Japanese language documents. These rules are called Kinsoku Shori.Word wrap rules
Categories
Regarding prohibited characters, there are some conventions, known as "house rules", which are specific to individual publishers. The rules of some publishers contradict those of other publishers. For that reason, there are many conventions that are not supported by Western desktop publishing software tools, and that is the main cause of the growing demand of computerized phototypesetting systems.Characters not permitted on the start of a line
- Closing brackets
- Japanese characters: chiisai kana and special marks
- Hyphens
- Delimiters
- Mid-sentence punctuation
- Sentence-ending punctuation
Characters not permitted at the end of a line
- Opening brackets
Do not split
- Characters that cannot be separated
- Numbers
- Grouped characters
Processing rules
; Burasage; Oidashi
; Oikomi
; Do not split
Line breaking rules in Korean text
Line breaking rules for Korean language have been described in the reference of Office Open XML, Ecma standard. There are rules about certain characters that are not allowed to start or end a line, such as below.- Characters that are not allowed at the start of a line :
!%),.:;?]\
Korean standards related to line breaking rules
- KS X ISO/IEC 26300:2007, OpenDocument standard in Korea, describes hyphenation at the start or at the end of line in OpenDocument.
- KS X 6001, standard for file specification of Korean word processor intermediate document, describes rules for line breaking at the end of page.