1909, a book with horizontal typesetting appeared in China, which was the book Phonetic Alphabet written by Liu who advocated pinyin reform.
1 95565438+1October1,at the beginning of one yuan, Vientiane was updated. Old subscribers who have just received Guangming Daily are surprised to find that the newspaper they are familiar with has changed. Yesterday, the words arranged vertically from top to bottom have actually gone sideways line by line today. Now, the state of reading newspapers has completely changed. I used to nod my head while reading the newspaper from top to bottom, but now I'm fine. This left-to-right typesetting makes people shake their heads when reading newspapers.
On the same day, Guangming Daily published an article entitled "Tell readers horizontally for this newspaper": "We believe that the typesetting methods of newspapers and books in modern China should change with the development of modern culture and its needs, and should change with the changes of people's living habits. The horizontal writing of Chinese characters is a development trend. "
Guo Moruo, Hu Yuzhi and other famous scholars also quickly wrote articles pointing out the scientific nature of the horizontal arrangement of Chinese characters. People's eyes are horizontal, and the line of sight is wider horizontally than vertically. When reading, the eyes and head rotate less, which is natural and labor-saving and not easy to get tired. It is also convenient to write various mathematical, logical and cultural formulas and foreign place names, and it can also improve the utilization rate of paper.
At this time, more than four years have passed since Mr. Chen Jiageng put forward the idea of "writing Chinese characters horizontally", that is, at the second session of the first session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in June 1950, Chen Jiageng formally proposed to the General Assembly that Chinese characters should be written horizontally from left to right.
Reading from vertical to horizontal is a great change in the writing style of Chinese characters. Many people are caught off guard and find it difficult to adapt. Wang Run, a compositor in Guangming Daily Printing Factory, personally experienced the revolution: "As a compositor, I am particularly unaccustomed to changing from vertical layout to horizontal layout. There were more than 20 young people in the workshop at that time, and they were not used to it at first. Because the literal direction is the same direction, it is often lined up and arranged vertically. This situation is understood by everyone. When they find something wrong, they laugh at themselves and change immediately. This situation has occurred several times and it takes about a week to get used to it. "
Guangming Daily was the most influential newspaper among intellectuals at that time, but intellectuals were very sensitive to words. Therefore, in the face of the brand-new Guangming Daily, some people welcome it and many people criticize it. Even journalists are a little uncomfortable, and the manuscripts handed in are still used to writing vertically. In order to change this situation, the editorial department specially printed a batch of manuscript paper, which was changed from vertical grid to horizontal grid and distributed to everyone for use, forcing everyone to change their habits from the change of manuscript paper.
Some readers have written to the newspaper to express their opposition. The most vocal ones are poets and calligraphers, because ancient poetry and calligraphy have always been written vertically, and now they want to write horizontally, but some people don't know how to write. Some readers said in the letter: "reading the newspaper now feels like hanging a landscape painting upside down." How to look at it is awkward. "
So, someone specially did an experiment: Select top students from Grade Three 10, divide them into two groups, male and female, and let them read lyric essays carefully selected from the same China Youth Daily. Results The gap is obvious: the reading speed of horizontal typesetting is 1.345 times that of vertical typesetting.
After Guangming Daily took the lead in practice, by June 1955 1 1, 17, the central newspaper had been changed to horizontal edition. 1956 65438+ 10/month 1, People's Daily has also been changed to a horizontal version, so far, the whole country has responded.
I used to write from right to left.
Hope to adopt