Editing Chinese characters (section)

=== Layout ===
{{Further|Horizontal and vertical writing in East Asian scripts}}
{{See also|Chinese punctuation|Japanese punctuation|Korean punctuation}}
From the earliest inscriptions until the 20th century, texts were generally laid out vertically—with characters written from top to bottom in columns, arranged from right to left. [[Word#Word boundaries|Word boundaries]] are generally not indicated with [[space (punctuation)|space]]s. A horizontal writing direction—with characters written from left to right in rows, arranged from top to bottom—only became predominant in the Sinosphere during the 20th century as a result of Western influence.{{sfnm|Li|2020|1p=54|Handel|2019|2p=27|Keightley|1978|3p=50}} Many publications outside mainland China continue to use the traditional vertical writing direction.{{sfnm|1a1=Taylor|1a2=Taylor|1y=2014|1pp=372–373|Bachner|2014|2p=245}} Western influence also resulted in the generalized use of punctuation being widely adopted in print during the 19th and 20th centuries. Prior to this, the context of a passage was considered adequate to guide readers; this was enabled by characters being easier to read than alphabets when [[scriptio continua|written without spaces or punctuation]] due to their more discretized shapes.{{sfnm|1a1=Needham|1a2=Harbsmeier|1y=1998|1pp=175–176|2a1=Taylor|2a2=Taylor|2y=2014|2pp=374–375}}