The history of East Asian character typesetting

The main characters in Oracle Bone Inscriptions are arranged from top to bottom, but scholars have different opinions on the left and right order. It is speculated that the vertical arrangement from right to left mainly comes from the way that the right hand holds the pen and the left hand holds the Jane and arranges it conveniently when writing bamboo slips.

There is no conclusion as to which is the first Chinese book in the world. The following are the opinions of scholars from all sides:

The Dictionary of the Chinese Language, published in Macau by the British missionary Ma Lixun in the early 19th century, is the first Chinese-English dictionary.

Lu Taizhang's book "At a glance" (1892) is compared with Chinese characters and Latin pinyin. Yan Fu's A Survey of English (194).

in January, 1915, Science magazine was founded. At that time, the inaugural issue said: "This magazine is printed with lines on the left, and it is read with western sentences, so as to insert arithmetic and physical chemistry programs. It is not so novel, so readers forgive it."

In any case, the horizontal collection of documents was still a rarity until the beginning of the 2th century. In 1917, the third issue of the third volume of New Youth published an open letter written by Qian Xuantong to Chen Duxiu. Qian thought that reading vertical characters was laborious and did not conform to the design of human eyes, and the strokes of Chinese characters also conformed to horizontal rows from left. Qian Xuantong has made similar claims many times, and Chen Duxiu agrees, but it has never become the mainstream. However, in the 194s, not only ordinary books and periodicals, but also academic works were arranged horizontally from left to right.

after the founding of the People's Republic of China, the horizontal arrangement of printed words has been gradually promoted before the implementation of the Chinese character simplification policy. Since January 1, 1955, Guangming Daily and others have taken the lead in changing to horizontal arrangement; Since January 1, 1956, the People's Daily and other central and local newspapers have all been changed to horizontal. Vertical characters were still used in a few publications (such as some comic books) in mainland China until the early 198s. At present, only newly printed ancient books, academic works and ancient poetry collections of modern and contemporary people still use vertical arrangement, while imported Japanese cartoons still use vertical arrangement. Outside the publishing industry, vertical text mainly appears on government department plaques, newspaper headlines and other occasions. Since 1974, the Ministry of Education of Singapore has also stipulated that textbooks and Chinese exams should be printed horizontally from left.

As for the communities that use traditional Chinese, such as Taiwan Province, Hongkong, China, Macau, China and overseas Chinese, there is no stipulation on the text direction of publications. Since 199s, there has been a tendency to use horizontal layout, but books and periodicals with vertical layout continue to be printed. Some newspapers even have horizontal and vertical articles in the same page, or the title is horizontal and the text is vertical.

On January 1st, 25, Taiwan Province promulgated the horizontal writing of official documents, which completely changed the long-standing habit of "straight writing" into "horizontal writing". Because Japanese imitates the writing style of Chinese, traditional Japanese is also written vertically, from top to bottom and then from right to left. Occasionally, due to the limitation of writing area, horizontal rows are used, such as Japanese door curtains and temple plaques, but they are still read from the right, which is a vertical row with only one word per row. Until the edo period, the traditional vertical characters were influenced by foreign studies (orchid studies? ) the influence of the trend, and began to imitate the horizontal writing of European characters.

Before the Japanese language was widely popular, it was very inconvenient to read the words side by side in foreign languages and Japanese: foreign languages would be printed horizontally as usual, but Japanese would be printed 9 degrees because of vertical arrangement. In the 18th year of Meiji (1885), the book Pocket Illustrated German-Japanese Dictionary appeared for the first time. Until the Second World War, newspapers and advertisements aimed at the general public were still read from the right unless they were written in mixed European languages.

according to the research of the house name Ikeda, around 194, there began to be a trend of discussing the direction of unified horizontal writing in various parts of Japan. In July 1942, the National Language Review Conference, an advisory body under the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, and Education, published a report that was unified from left to horizontal. After the war, the United Nations General Command sent an American education envoy to Japan to review the educational system reform. The report of the mission put forward the movement of adopting Roman characters and abolishing Chinese characters, which led to the idea and image that "imitating western Europe's horizontal arrangement from the left is innovative and horizontal arrangement from the right is conservative", and the horizontal arrangement from the right further declined. The Yomiuri Shimbun on January 1, 1946 and the B5 banknote issued in March, 1948 became the beginning of horizontal arrangement from left to right. The document format guide for Japanese government departments, The Essentials of Document Making, also points out that "in order to improve job efficiency, document writing methods should be widely used from left to horizontal". In today's Korea, straight writing is quite rare, and the mainstream is still horizontal from left. A special case is the subtitles of foreign language movies. Generally speaking, they are placed on the right side of the picture, and they are arranged vertically. Just like Chinese, Korean traditionally runs horizontally from the right, but now it is used to the left.

In addition, punctuation marks in vertical and horizontal rows are written differently in Korean standard language (). Japanese-like symbols are used in vertical rows, while western punctuation is used in horizontal rows. After the implementation of simplified Chinese in China and Singapore, vertical characters are not common in publications, and can only be seen when the typesetting space is limited, such as some newspaper titles, spine, signboards, slogans and flags. Long simplified Chinese publications must be arranged horizontally. However, traditional cultural contents, such as most calligraphy works (except hard pen calligraphy), invitations, and all couplets, which use simplified Chinese characters, are still written vertically. In addition, most of the typographical ancient books published in mainland China are still arranged vertically in traditional Chinese characters. Many people's business cards or personal letters are also vertical. North Korea and South Korea on the Korean peninsula also treat Korean in the same way.

There has been no compulsory order for language arrangement in Taiwan Province, and this situation continues to this day in the areas of Taiwan, Pengjin and Jinma under its jurisdiction, that is, the phenomenon of mixed word arrangement methods is common. For example, in Mashan Observatory, a famous battlefield attraction in kinmen county, the gate is lined with Zuo Shu, the slogan is lined up vertically, and the visitor's card is lined with books on the right.

both Chinese and Japanese in Taiwan Province, Hong Kong and Macao are used horizontally and vertically, but Japanese is used vertically more often. Because vertical arrangement is a traditional writing method, calligraphy, Chinese textbooks, novels and poems, and conservative newspapers and periodicals will continue to use vertical arrangement. Japanese-style personal business cards are often written vertically on one side of Japanese and horizontally on the other side of English. Horizontal layout is used for books and periodicals in foreign languages, mathematics, science, music and other categories to match the layout of other characters. This may also be due to the convenience of computer typesetting. Vertical books and periodicals may use horizontal layout in some columns or pages to accommodate layout design.

vertical books and periodicals generally turn left to right, while horizontal books and periodicals turn right to left, but there are exceptions. Most newspapers in Hong Kong turn from left to right; However, Ming Pao, which was revised in 23, used horizontal layout, but continued to use the design of turning from left to right, which was suitable for vertical layout.

In addition, because simplified Chinese usually uses horizontal layout, World Journal, a traditional Chinese newspaper in the United States, was regarded by some readers as a pro-Beijing move. The computer was developed by the English-speaking country, the United States, which uses horizontal layout from the left, and the Arabic numeral system used is also horizontal, so the horizontal layout has an overwhelming advantage for computers with poor initial performance. At that time, most of the Chinese character circle languages typeset by computer also adopted horizontal arrangement.

However, in recent years, with the increase of computer performance and capacity, and the trend of computer popularization and multilingualism, users have also begun to demand language arrangement other than horizontal arrangement from left. Microsoft Word and other word processing software are the first to bear the brunt. In the early days, vertical arrangement system was introduced in relevant versions to facilitate users in East Asia. Later, some e-books and greeting card making software also added vertical compatibility.

At present, there are many computer document softwares that can be used for vertical editing and desktop publishing, such as Adobe Indesign, Microsoft Word and QuarkXPress. These softwares mainly support Chinese vertical editing: adding Chinese and English mixed typesetting, and combining Chinese fonts with western fonts into a custom font set; The function of avoiding head points can automatically prevent punctuation marks from appearing at the beginning or end of a line, thus reducing the ugliness of Chinese typesetting. In the past, these functions had to be implemented by plug-ins. At present, the new desktop publishing software supports the vertical Chinese function. In the Internet era, most web pages will display Chinese characters horizontally. However, due to the need to convert documents edited by word processing software (such as Microsoft Word) supporting vertical orientation into web pages, Microsoft Internet Explorer introduced some CSS extensions to express such texts. In 21, a draft to add writing-mode support was proposed, but it did not become a standard in the end. At present, only Microsoft's Internet Explorer can directly support vertical orientation.

In China, since mid-28, due to increasingly strict Internet censorship, some Internet surfers have written simple procedures to convert horizontal texts into vertical ones to avoid censorship. This program will substantially rearrange the order of the text and insert some separators such as vertical lines, so it can be read normally without the support of the browser. Because the order of the words is out of order, the general keyword filtering program will lose its effectiveness.