Rules for Breaking Lines in Asian Languages

Line-breaking and word-wrapping algorithms are important to text parsing as well as to text display. The rules for Asian languages, however, are quite different from the rules for Western languages. For example, unlike most Western written languages, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai do not necessarily indicate the distinction between words by using spaces. The Thai language doesn't even use punctuation. For these languages, software applications cannot conveniently base line breaks and word-wrapping algorithms on a space character or on standard hyphenation rules. They must follow different guidelines.

Because the Win32 full-text search engine for Microsoft WinHelp recognizes that word wrapping is more complex for some languages than for others, it supports the IWordBreak OLE interface. That way, if a third-party developer creates a superior word-wrapping algorithm for any language, the WinHelp engine can take advantage of it through OLE.