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Chinese editorial design

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Chinese typography 101 please!

I am working on a bilingual document at work, Mandarin (simplified) & English. I am acutely conscious of my complete lack of sensibility. In the short time I have available on the project I would like to begin to address this and hopefully gain a little understanding along the way.

Maybe what I need breaks down into two categories:

• General rules for typesetting - for equivalent example in Latin: No orphans
• Strong editorial style - perhaps there are some Chinese design blogs out there…

Thank you all

Chapter 7, Typography, of my latest book entitled CJK Information Processing (Second Edition), covers much of what you need. In general, Chinese typsetting is a subset of the features required for Japanese typesetting. There are no spaces, so windows and orphans are handled on a per-character basis, meaning that some characters are prohibited from ending lines, and some are prohibited from beginning lines. Horizontal writing is preferred in China, so you shouldn't need to deal with the additional intricacies of vertical writing.

-- Ken

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