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In HTML and CSS, how do I make japanese text break lines correctly?

Asked 2011-03-09T17:04:59.080
21

I'm writting a simple paragraph in both English and Japanese, using only HTML and CSS. The English text breaks lines normally (when a word doesn't fit on a line anymore, it's pushed to the next one).

With Japanese though, not a whole word is pushed to the next line, but part of it only. I've tried setting word-wrap to break-word and normal, but nothing changes (with the Japanese text).

How to I make whole words in Japanese jump to the next line like it happens in English?

html css unicode internationalization word-wrap
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15

English separates words with spaces, Japanese doesn't.

Whether characters in Japanese form a word or not depends on context. In many cases, looking for certain grammatical (Kana) particles could be used to separate words - but this wouldn't even be close to being reliable.

Essentially, you'd need a Japanese dictionary / understanding of the language to identify where the words start and end - a browser won't know how to do this.

Alternatively, if you know the start and end of the words, you could perhaps wrap each one in a span - then use CSS to ensure each span wraps to a new line as a whole when it doesn't fit.

answered 2011-04-04T08:04:14.967

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