Chapter 5. Characters in Each Country

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Japanese language can also written in the same direction to Latin languages. Japanese books and

magazines on science and technology are written in this direction. It is enough for almost usual

softwares to support this direction only.

A few Japanese characters have to have different fonts for vertical direction. They are reason 

able characters   parentheses and 'long syllable' symbol whose shape is like dash in English or

mathematical 'minus' sign. Symbols equivalent to period and comma also have different style for

horizontal and vertical direction.

In Japan, Arabic numerical characters are widely used, like European languages, though we have

Kanji (ideogram) numerical characters. Latin characters can also appear in Japanese texts. If a row

of 1   3 (or 4) characters of Arabic and Latin appear in Japanese vertical text, these characters can

be crowded into one column. If more characters appear (large numbers or long words), the paper

is rotated 90 degree in anticlockwise and the characters are written in European way. Sometimes

Latin characters which appears in vertical text are written in the same way as Japanese character,

i.e., vertical direction. This is not so strong custom. Arabic and Latin characters can always be

written in both normal and rotated way in vertical text.

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DTP system should support all of them.

A version of Japanized TeX (developed by ASCII, a publishing company in Japan) can use vertical

direction. This can also treat a page containing both vertical and horizontal texts.

5.1.7 Layout of Characters

In Japanese language, words are not separated by space and a line can be broken anywhere, with

a few exceptions, unlike European languages. Thus hyphenation is not needed for Japanese.

Characters like open parentheses cannot come to the end of a line. Characters like close parenthe 

ses and sorts of sentence separating marks such as period and comma cannot come to the top of a

line. This rule and processing is called 'kinsoku' in Japanese.

In European languages, a break of line is equivalent to a space. In Japanese language, a break of

line should be neglected. For example, when rendering an HTML file, line breaking character in

the HTML source should not be converted into whitespace.

5.1.8 LANG variable

Different value of

LANG

used for different encodings.

Following values are used for EUC JP.

LANG=ja_JP.eucJP

(major for Linux and *BSD)

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I HAVE TO SHOW EXAMPLE USING GRAPHICS.