My primary interest is in correct electronic rendering of text in
these languages, although it's only a desire for it to be done right,
not any commercial or personal requirement.

It was probably in the Unicode 3.0 standard book that I learned (to my
delight and amazement) that proper line breaks in Thai require a
dictionary lookup, because Thai has no word spaces.

What I'm wondering is whether dictionary lookup is desirable (or
almost essential) in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. My knowledge of
these languages is optimistically described as spotty, but I suspect
that some, if not all, can look bad if line breaks appear almost
anywhere. I simply don't know Korean at all, but it seems that in
Japanese and Chinese, small sequences of characters are better left
intact, not split across lines.

(Unfortunately, modern English-language newspaper typesetting seems to
ignore hyphenation rules, even though (for instance) Digital Equipment
Corp. (iirc) had an excellent, highly-developed and refined
"hyphenator".)

Just curious...

Nicholas Bodley |@| Waltham, Mass.
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