The composition of those words can differ significantly from language to language. Khmer, which typically doesn't visually separate either within a phrase, but is strongly inclined to treat 'words' as a basic unit when wrapping lines, rather than syllables or characters).Įven if a word is assumed, for a particular set of languages, to be a sequence of letters bounded by spaces, linguistically-speaking this obscures some significant underlying differences and complications. Others do not visually identify word or syllable boundaries at all, but maintain a distinction between words and syllables (eg. Some languages, however, are written in scripts that only delimit syllables, but still regard words as units that are composed of one or more syllables (eg. Often applications and algorithms assume that a word is a sequence of characters delimited by space, or occasionally some other punctuation character. whether the writing system wraps words, syllables, or characters to the next line.Ī clear definition of the term ' word' is very difficult to arrive at, and yet the distinction between words and syllables is significant in certain languages for the purposes of line-breaking.whether 'words' or syllables are separated in the text, and if so, how, and.The most fundamental algorithm used to wrap text at the end of a line depends on the confluence of two factors: We will only give examples of the main differences, rather than exhaustively list all the details.įor more detailed information about how line-breaking happens in various scripts, see the International text layout and typography index. Some writing systems allow hyphenation, and others don't. Special rules apply to pretty much all scripts affecting what characters can and can't start or end a line. This article provides a broad overview of the different strategies used by different writing systems, but is only an overview. For a similar high-level summary of approaches to justification see Approaches to full justification. Line-breaking is often a precursor to text justification. This article gives a high level summary of various typographic strategies for wrapping text at the end of a line, for a variety of scripts.
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