> Some of oriental characters in Japanese and Korean are usually > aligned as if they have 2 columns per character. > > Japanese has another formatting rule that punctuation characters > cannot appear at the beginning of or end of line (depending on > their meanings). The proposed C<Format::format> has different breaking behaviour, in that it doesn't break at all unless it absolutely must, or if the user specifies an explicit breaking subroutine. I could easily envisage the standard Format module providing additional standard breaking subs to cover the (important) internationalization issues you raise: break_16bit, break_kanji, etc. Since this would be part of the standard module (and therefore presumably implemented in C and integrated with the C<format> function itself), I don't believe speed would be an issue. I will mention this prospect in the final version of the RFC. Damian
