The line breaking rules in East Asian languages specify how to wrap East Asian Language text such as

Chinese Chinese may refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people identified with China, through nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **Han Chinese, East Asian ethnic group native to China. **'' Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic ...

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

, and

Korean Korean may refer to: People and culture * Koreans, people from the Korean peninsula or of Korean descent * Korean culture * Korean language **Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Korean **Korean dialects **See also: North–South differences in t ...

. 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 A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Word processor (electronic device), Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicate ...

and

desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using dedicated software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online co ...

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 are the standards used for industrial activities in Japan, coordinated by the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee (JISC) and published by the Japanese Standards Association (JSA). The JISC is composed of many nationwide committees and play ...

JIS X 4051, and it is called .―. JIS X 4051:2004 Formatting Rules for Japanese Documents (). Japanese Standards Association. 2004.

Line breaking rules in Chinese text

Line breaking rules for Chinese language have been described in the reference of

Office Open XML Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML) is a zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Ecma International standardized the initial version ...

, 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 :} *Characters that are not allowed at the end of a line :

Traditional Chinese

*Characters that are not allowed at the start of a line :} *Characters that are not allowed at the end of a line : *Characters that are not allowed at the end of a line :

Korean standards related to line breaking rules

*KS X ISO/IEC 26300:2007,

OpenDocument The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, standardized as ISO 26300, is an open file format for word processor, word processing documents, spreadsheets, Presentation program, presentations and ...

standard in

Korea Korea is a peninsular region in East Asia consisting of the Korean Peninsula, Jeju Island, and smaller islands. Since the end of World War II in 1945, it has been politically Division of Korea, divided at or near the 38th parallel north, 3 ...

, describes

hyphen The hyphen is a punctuation mark used to join words and to separate syllables of a single word. The use of hyphens is called hyphenation. The hyphen is sometimes confused with dashes (en dash , em dash and others), which are wider, or with t ...

ation at the start or at the end of line in OpenDocument.―. KS X ISO/IEC 26300:2007 Information technology - Open Document Format for Office Applications:(OpenDocument) v1.0 (). Korean Agency for Technology and Standards. 2007. pp. 531-532. (This is a duplicate standard of ISO/IEC 26300:2006) *KS X 6001, standard for file specification of Korean

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current word ...

intermediate document, describes rules for line breaking at the end of page.―. KS X 6001 File Specification for Korean Document Interchange (). Korean Agency for Technology and Standards. 2005. pp. 16.

References

External links

Rules for Breaking Lines in Asian Languages
Microsoft Go Global Developer Center {{DEFAULTSORT:Line breaking rules in East Asian language East Asian typography Japanese writing system Korean writing system