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Support typesetting for CJK text


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I'm a designer in China, and Affinity products are gaining popularity here because of its low price and easy-to-use tools. It would be even nicer if we can get better typesetting results for CJK text, such as dealing with CJK punctuations properly (avoid line start and end while placing punctuations (标点避头尾), as well as aligning CJK characters in grids due to their block-y nature, see example 1), and having true up-to-down, right-to-left vertical text (instead of rotating text and/or squeezing multiline text, see example 2).

Surely I know this is going to be a tough work to figure out all the rules when typesetting CJK text and implementing them, but it would pay back greatly by gaining even more users in eastern Asia (I suppose).

 

Examples:

1.

image.png.388b87e9d3e6242073f31fb283748b25.png

A paragraph of Chinese text in Affinity Publisher. Notice the square closing quotation mark (up) and full-width comma (down) are not directly after their contents.

image.png.3b4a5e7a09681f8f3c2bd9d66473b0a2.pngimage.png.2a11073c88d4b296008a68fc2556b562.png

The same paragraph in Adobe InDesign. The line feed points and punctuation glyph widths are modified to fit the punctuations in line.

2.

image.png.3ccbb816c54d4788b34aeb57d47b7fc5.png

A paragraph of vertical text in Adobe InDesign.

image.png.06c41fc65c2cb316cef3cc30e28910ec.png

The current workaround to create vertical text in Affinity softwares. Notice the misplaced punctuations and latin letters.

 

To be clear, I'm using Adobe InDesign only for comparison. I'm not saying that it's perfect. In fact, it's the inconsistency of shortcuts and gestures among Adobe softwares that drew me to the Affinity family. Affinity softwares are fantasic, but it can be more fantastic if we get these features.

 

The source of text used in examples above, and also a great reference for Chinese typesetting:
https://thetype.com/2017/11/13290/ The greatest myth in Chinese typesetting: hanging punctuation - Type is Beautiful (Chinese webpage)

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On 11/24/2019 at 10:39 PM, loyukfai said:

 

Maybe these documents from W3C can help Affinity's developers know what they need to implement:

Not all features are that eagerly needed, but at least the key and most demanding features for Eastern Asian typesetting like positioning of punctuation marks (JP, CN) and vertical text (JP, CN) should be implemented with high priority. They are the core of typesetting, and with even only the first feature (punctuation mark positioning) we can build designs with much more ease.

 

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Also copied to Loykufai's thread

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