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Japanese typesetting: mobile vs. desktop
Thread poster: Clare Urbanski
Clare Urbanski
Clare Urbanski
United States
Feb 17, 2022

I'm proofing the typesetting of some Japanese text that was provided to me by a translator, which is something I'm fairly new to. Said translator has given me lots of great feedback on best practices for avoiding long sound symbols, small kana, interpuncts, closing punctuation, etc. at the beginning of lines in the documents that are going to print. However, some of the text is going on the web, and when I switch my preview display between desktop and mobile, the mobile version usually puts line... See more
I'm proofing the typesetting of some Japanese text that was provided to me by a translator, which is something I'm fairly new to. Said translator has given me lots of great feedback on best practices for avoiding long sound symbols, small kana, interpuncts, closing punctuation, etc. at the beginning of lines in the documents that are going to print. However, some of the text is going on the web, and when I switch my preview display between desktop and mobile, the mobile version usually puts line breaks in awkward spots so that a bunch of those kinds of characters end up at the beginning of lines.

Does anyone have experience in how this is usually dealt with? I'm finding a lot of questions on web forums about line breaking in Japanese, but they're usually marked as "resolved" once the responders explain that it's okay to break in the middle of a word. I know that's the case, but I also know that doesn't mean all bets are off. What about small kana and long sound symbols and such? ▲ Collapse
 
James Plastow
James Plastow  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:43
Member (2020)
Japanese to English
Check the sites Feb 20, 2022

At the risk of being too obvious a solution, I would simply check some articles on the mobile sites of a few of the major Japanese news outlets and see how they do it.
 
Clare Urbanski
Clare Urbanski
United States
TOPIC STARTER
Back end? Feb 21, 2022

James Plastow wrote:

At the risk of being too obvious a solution, I would simply check some articles on the mobile sites of a few of the major Japanese news outlets and see how they do it.


Thanks for that suggestion—it is helpful in some regard because I can see occasional examples of the text wrapping "misbehaving" on those sites, but unfortunately it still doesn't tell me if there are additional steps that can be taken on the back end to help mitigate them.
 
James Plastow
James Plastow  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 16:43
Member (2020)
Japanese to English
<br> tags Feb 23, 2022

Hi,
I had a little google in Japanese as it is an interesting question. It looks like people use an html br tag when they want to split the line (rather than a p tag which would create a new paragraph). Sorry you probably know all this. As you saw on the news websites, I doubt that many people bother to do this in Japan for the benefit of viewing on mobile. My Japanese wife is adamant that you can break a line wherever you want in Japanese!
 


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Japanese typesetting: mobile vs. desktop






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