With the development of printing industry, there are often notes in China's ancient books, and the forms of notes have also changed. The ancients carved the book vertically and put many double lines in the middle of the text, which is called "double-line note" The shape of the note is smaller than the body.
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With the extensive use of punctuation marks and the popularization of horizontal printing, the font of brackets can be as big as the text when using "brackets" (such as various forms of brackets), but in order to distinguish the text from comments, the font of comments has been changed. Horizontal printing generally does not need double lines of notes, and the note number is used to indicate the note text.
The content of parenthesis expands with the expansion of the meaning of "annotation". At first, the content of annotation was limited to the annotation of Confucian classics, and later it developed into phonetic notation, exegesis, word discrimination, chapter analysis, sentence analysis, textual research of famous things, inference of word meaning, collation of different texts, and indication of sources.
Even informative appendices can be mixed with notes. Therefore, with the development of publishing industry, not only the form of annotations is constantly changing, but also the content of annotations is constantly expanding. However, the purpose of annotations is unchanged, that is, to facilitate readers and make them understand the text more comprehensively, profoundly and accurately.