The history of East Asian character typesetting

The main characters in Oracle Bone Inscriptions are arranged from top to bottom, but scholars have different views 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 bamboo slips, which is convenient for arrangement.

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

At the beginning of the 9th century, the Chinese Dictionary published in Macau by the British missionary Ma Lixun was the first Chinese-English dictionary in the world.

Lu Taizhang's "At a glance" (1892) is a comparison between Chinese characters and Latin pinyin. Introduction to English by Yan Fu (1904).

1915 65438+10, Science magazine was founded. At that time, the inaugural issue said: "This magazine is printed on the left side with lines and read in western sentences, so as to insert arithmetic and physical chemistry programs. Not so novel, readers forgive me. "

In any case, until the early 20th century, the horizontal collection of China literature was still a rarity. 19 17 the third issue of new youth published an open letter written by Qian to Chen Duxiu. Qian thinks that reading vertical characters is laborious, which is not in line with the design of human eyes, and the strokes of Chinese characters are also in line with horizontal rows starting from left. Qian Ceng put forward similar ideas many times, and Chen Duxiu agreed with them, but they never became the mainstream. But in the1940s, not only ordinary books and periodicals, but also academic works appeared horizontally from left to right.

After the founding of People's Republic of China (PRC), the horizontal arrangement of printed characters has been gradually popularized before the implementation of the simplification policy of Chinese characters. From 65438+65438+/kloc-0 in 0955 to 1 in October, Guangming Daily took the lead in changing to horizontal layout; From 0956' s 65438+65438+1 October's1,people's daily and other central and local newspapers will be horizontal. Until1early 1980s, there were still a few publications (such as some cartoons) in Chinese mainland that used vertical characters. 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 in government departments' 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 the left.

As for communities that use traditional Chinese characters, such as Taiwan Province Province, Hongkong, China, Macau, China and overseas Chinese, there is no stipulation on the direction of the text of publications. Since1990s, there has been a trend of using horizontal format, but books and periodicals with vertical format are still being printed. Some newspapers even have horizontal and vertical articles on the same page, or the title is horizontal and the text is vertical.

On June 5438+1 October1in 2005, Taiwan Province Province promulgated the horizontal writing of official documents, which completely changed the long-standing habit of "straight writing" to "horizontal writing". Because Japanese imitates Chinese writing, traditional Japanese is also written vertically, from top to bottom and then from right to left. Occasionally, due to the limitation of writing area, I will use horizontal rows, such as Japanese door curtains and temple plaques, but I still read them from the right, which is vertical, with only one word per row. Until the edo period, the traditional vertical characters were studied by foreign countries (Lan Xue? ) the influence of the trend began to imitate the horizontal writing of European characters.

Before the popularity of horizontal Japanese, it was very inconvenient for foreign languages and Japanese to read characters side by side: foreign languages would be horizontally arranged as usual, but Japanese would be 90 degrees because of vertical arrangement. In Meiji 18 (1885), the book Pocket Illustrated German-Japanese Dictionary appeared for the first time. Until World War II, newspapers and advertisements for the general public were still read from the right, unless they were written in mixed European languages.

According to the textual research of the name of the house, around 1940, the trend of discussing the unified horizontal writing direction began to appear in various parts of Japan. In July, 1942, the National Language Review Conference, an advisory body under the Ministry of Education, released a report that was unified from left to right. After the war, the United Nations General Command sent an American education envoy to Japan to review the reform of the education system. 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 from left to horizontal is innovative and from right to horizontal is conservative" and further declined from right to horizontal. 1 946+1October1Yomiuri shimbun and1B50 banknotes issued in March, 948 began to be horizontally arranged from the left. The document format guide of Japanese government departments-essentials of document production also points out that "in order to improve work efficiency, the left-to-horizontal document writing method should be widely used". In today's Korea, direct writing is quite rare, and the mainstream still writes horizontally 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 arranged vertically. Just like Chinese, Korean has traditionally walked sideways from the right, but now it is used to walking to the left.

In addition, the writing of straight punctuation marks and horizontal punctuation marks in Korean standard language is different (). 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 typesetting is not common in publications, and it can only be seen when the typesetting space is limited, such as the titles, spines, signboards, slogans and flags of some newspapers. Long simplified Chinese publications must be arranged horizontally. Traditional cultural contents, such as most calligraphy works (except hard-pen calligraphy), invitations and all couplets, use simplified Chinese characters and are still written vertically. In addition, most of the printed ancient books published in Chinese mainland 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 Koreans in this way.

There has been no compulsory order for language arrangement in Taiwan Province Province, and this situation has continued to this day in the areas under the jurisdiction of Taiwan Province, Jin Peng and Jinma, that is, the phenomenon of mixed language arrangement methods is widespread. 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 books are lined up on the right side of the visitor card.

Chinese and Japanese in Taiwan Province, Hongkong and Macau are all used horizontally and vertically, but Japanese is more used vertically. 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 personal business cards are often written vertically in Japanese and horizontally in English. Horizontal arrangement is used for books and periodicals in foreign languages, mathematics, science, music and other categories to match the layout of other languages. 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 adapt to layout design.

Vertical books and periodicals generally turn from left to right, and horizontal books and periodicals turn from right to left, but there are exceptions. Most newspapers in Hong Kong turn from left to right; However, in 2003, the revised Ming Pao used horizontal layout, but it continued to use the design of turning from left to right, which was suitable for vertical layout.

In addition, because simplified Chinese usually adopts horizontal layout, the traditional Chinese newspaper World Journal in the United States is changed to horizontal layout, which is regarded by some readers as a pro-Beijing move. The computer was developed by the English-speaking country, the United States, and the horizontal layout is adopted 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, as well as the trend of computer popularization and multi-language, users have also begun to demand language arrangement other than left and horizontal. Word processing software such as Microsoft Word bears the brunt. In the early stage, the vertical arrangement system was introduced in the relevant version 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, combining Chinese fonts and western fonts into a custom font set; The function of avoiding head marks can automatically prevent punctuation marks from appearing at the beginning or end of a line and reduce the ugliness of Chinese typesetting. In the past, these functions had to be realized by plug-ins. At present, the new desktop publishing software supports vertical Chinese function. In the Internet age, 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 200 1 year, a draft to increase the support of writing mode was put forward, but it did not become a standard in the end. At present, only Microsoft's ie browser can directly support the vertical direction.

In China, since mid-2008, due to the increasingly strict Internet censorship, some Internet surfers have written simple programs to convert horizontal texts into vertical texts to avoid censorship. This program will substantially rearrange the order of the text and insert some separators such as vertical lines, so that it can be read normally without browser support. Because the order of words is out of order, the general keyword filtering program will lose its effectiveness.