Punctuation and justification in Japanese text

[Focx 2]

I'm currently trying to work with a Japanese text in two justified columns, which means there are bound to be many lines. Now, for some reason punctuation gets not treated as such, but gets bumped into the next line as if it were an ordinary character (see example). I've tried playing around with optical alignment to no avail and am a bit lost. Am I missing something or is this related to some quirk with Japanese?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Patrick Connor 3,461]

@Focx

Welcome to the Serif Affinity forums

i think that this is a bug caused by a lack of whitespace. I have moved your post to the bugs forum. Are you on Mac or Windows (I suspect this happens on both anyway)

[Focx 2]

I'm on a Mac -- thanks!

[thomaso 361]

On 5/6/2019 at 10:35 AM, Focx said:

Am I missing something or is this related to some quirk with Japanese?

One quirk in Chinese (like your sample): every character, punctuation included, takes the same space. Like monospace fonts did in old typewriters. In your screenshot it appears not to work for ", 1", so it might be an issue with the used font. With for instance Songti SC there is more space between "," and "1":

Unfortunately it does not solve your issue completely, cause there should not be a line break before a comma. That's a difficulty reported already:

or here, too:
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/75274-missing-asian-punctuation-support/&do=findComment&comment=393325

[thomaso 361]

Concerning line breaks with narrow text frames AfPub behaves different to, for instance, InDesign:
Whereas in AfPub a line break may happen any time and allows to – simply by narrowing the frame width – one char per line, InDesign would just not show the text but overflow instead if the frame gets too narrow for its words, numbers included.

AfPub   vs.   InDesign:

   

[Focx 2]

Thanks for letting me know thomaso, it would be great to get that fixed. I agree, it's the line break before the comma that's the issue, because it happens regardless of whether there's a number after the comma or whether I use western or Japanese commas (, or 、).

[thomaso 361]

8 minutes ago, Focx said:

it's the line break before the comma that's the issue,

In your screenshot I see missing space, too. Between comma and 1950. – That might get fixed by yourself with another font.

p.s.: Chinese here, not Japanese

[Focx 2]

I tried adding a space behind a normal comma but it didn't change anything. Then I tried a full-width comma + space and it worked -- but not in another case in the same document. There I was able to fix it using the "spacing" -> "tighten more" function. Seems like a nice workaround!

[thomaso 361]

9 hours ago, Focx said:

Seems like a nice workaround!

In proper Chinese fonts both punctuation and syllable glyphs have same width ('Advance width').
(different to numbers, they are latin/arabic)

So such a workaround with manually added white spice to influence the apparence on (western) screen, can get risky if your layout file goes to China for text control or print production.

[loyukfai 14]

Serif seem to be somewhat aware of this issue, but thus far have not found the urge and/or manpower to fix it.

For the time being, the lack of proper support for CJK punctuations/typesetting renders all Affinity products unusable to Asian/CJK users for any work that involves significant amounts of CJK textual content.

Cheers.

[ashf 97]

This line breaking rule is called Kinsoku Shori in Japan.
Almost same rule exists in other Asian languages such as Chinese  or Korean.
Punctuation, hyphens and closing brackets are not allowed to be placed on the start of a line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_breaking_rules_in_East_Asian_languages

[Patrick Connor 3,461]

@Jon P I don't think this is in the developer database, sorry

[ashf 97]

FYI, most of software that can handle Asian text have an option to turn on/off Asian rule.
Dev team doesn't need to make them work in non-Asian language.
Asian users will turn on these feature explicitly when they need.
So it should be turned off by default.
Then it won't be confusing nor become a problem to non-Asian users.

[ashf 97]

@FocxPlease add "line breaking" tag to this topic.

[loyukfai 14]

This is a problem which exists on both Win and Mac platforms, BTW.