Re: [Lingo] spaces in japanese writing

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

Josh Glover writes:

 > The Japanese 「、」 character (Unicode U+3001 IDEOGRAPHIC COMMA[1]) has
 > spacing built into the glyph in every Japanese font I've ever seen.

I'm not sure whether there are fonts with a different width for some
characters, or if Word kerns some of them, but I've never found a way
to get reliable alignment but character count in Word.

 > The comma usage rule in Japanese is wonderful:
 > 
 > "Stick a comma anywhere you would pause if you were reading the sentence."

That's the rule in English, too, you know.  The main difference is
that English speakers normally form paragraphs out of sentences, while
Japanese (like Germans) often do the reverse, so they have less need
for full stops. ;-)