As with all languages, it's certainly the case that if you unnaturally break things up, there's the chance of introducing ambiguity. However, it's also the case that context will resolve the matter most of the time. And in the worst case scenario, it's not as if the watch is the only means by which we can read the messages. We can think about the well known joke in English about the importance of commas for a comparable example: "Let's eat grandpa!"
Unfortunately, although I am familiar with the linguistic and orthographic side of this problem, I am not familiar with the coding side. But a method that could theoretically be used to handle run on English sentences such as "Thequickbrownfoxjumpsoverthelazydog" would be our best starting point.
One solution I can imagine would be to cut the line once it approaches the side margin of the screen at a point where the preceding characters form a block divisible by two and then starting a new line; the software could go on like this until it both reaches the bottom margin and cannot reasonably shrink the bitmaps down any further, at which point it must necessarily elide any remaining text.
So applying this proposal for how to cut up lines to article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we would get the following if we assume a character limit of 11 per line (characters bolded to show where words get split up):
As you can see from the above, only two words get split up (thanks in part to punctuation in Mandarin being full-width, hence taking up the same space as a "normal" character). These splits do not result in any ambiguity in this example either.
Espruino is a JavaScript interpreter for low-power Microcontrollers. This site is both a support community for Espruino and a place to share what you are working on.
Hello, Gordon,
As with all languages, it's certainly the case that if you unnaturally break things up, there's the chance of introducing ambiguity. However, it's also the case that context will resolve the matter most of the time. And in the worst case scenario, it's not as if the watch is the only means by which we can read the messages. We can think about the well known joke in English about the importance of commas for a comparable example: "Let's eat grandpa!"
Unfortunately, although I am familiar with the linguistic and orthographic side of this problem, I am not familiar with the coding side. But a method that could theoretically be used to handle run on English sentences such as "Thequickbrownfoxjumpsoverthelazydog" would be our best starting point.
One solution I can imagine would be to cut the line once it approaches the side margin of the screen at a point where the preceding characters form a block divisible by two and then starting a new line; the software could go on like this until it both reaches the bottom margin and cannot reasonably shrink the bitmaps down any further, at which point it must necessarily elide any remaining text.
So applying this proposal for how to cut up lines to article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we would get the following if we assume a character limit of 11 per line (characters bolded to show where words get split up):
人人生而自由﹐在尊嚴 (10 characters)
和權利上一律平等。他 (10 characters)
們賦有理性和良心﹐並 (10 characters)
應以兄弟關係的精神互 (10 characters)
相對待。 (4 characters)
As you can see from the above, only two words get split up (thanks in part to punctuation in Mandarin being full-width, hence taking up the same space as a "normal" character). These splits do not result in any ambiguity in this example either.