Those characters sometimes appear with no space after a title, like 初の日本デビューショーケース「Kep1er Japan Debut Showcase Live ＜FLY‐UP＞」を収録 or WA DA DA (Japanese ver.)～IMLAY Remix～
What is the guideline to follow for such characters? Personally, it looks visually ugly to have them so close to the title, like on Mora’s webpage.
I usually don’t use spaces in Japanese titles, but I don’t know if there’s a standard. I believe our local Japanese expert @yindesu might have a better answer tho~
Usually, historically, it is not natural to type spaces in Japanese.
And characters that need spacing usually include the spacing:
ショーケース「Kep1er. … Live＜FLY‐UP＞」を収録
Those 「＜＞」 have the needed visual spaces (I removed the useless space before ＜), not on your computer?
Likewise with fullwidth parenthesis.
It’s weird, in some pages I see the space from the character, but in others I can’t. They also show up short sometimes and other times long.
No visual space, long:
Visual space (plus extra space I added), short:
Those are for sure the same character since I copied it directly from Mora, I’m not using the “~” from my keyboard, so I don’t know why MB displays it like that.
That’s just a result of how the particular font used on the page (Arial from the looks of it) chooses to render that particular character.
This is what it looks like for me with a different font:
I think it is also important to note that you can’t judge the typography of a Japanese text with an understanding of typography of texts in Latin scripts. Japanese follows its own rules of what constitutes beautiful or ugly typography.
BTW this is a FULLWIDTH TILDE ～ U+FF5E used.
What should be used is 波ダッシュ 〜 WAVE DASH U+301C http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/波ダッシュ#Unicode.E3.81.AB.E9.96.A2.E9.80.A3.E3.81.99.E3.82.8B.E5.95.8F.E9.A1.8C
There is a history of mistakes on Microsoft and Unicode sides, that ended up wrongfully using FULLWIDTH TILDE instead of WAVE DASH for mapping with JIS 波ダッシュ (nami dash, wave dash).
But the correct character is WAVE DASH.
Maybe when fixing to WAVE DASH (〜), it will look better?
Just to chip in to the discussion here, part of the beauty of all Japanese text being
ｆｕｌｌ ｗｉｄｔｈ
is that characters generally are positioned and padded within their ‘boxes’ in such a way that unbroken strings of Japanese text will look just fine.
For example、commas come pre-packaged with their own spaces, and if you want to 「quote things」then those also similarly are spaced such that it looks pretty within its own native context. And for that matter, the period。is much the same as a comma.
So, bottom line, I’d say that ASCII spaces have no place in Japanese titles unless there’s a really special and explicit case where artist intent shows them as belonging there.
However full width spaces are also used in Japanese so there’s that to consider as well. (which this forum just eats, I guess, and turns them into our ASCII spaces… lovely)
Bottom line, copy what the Japanese people are putting in Japanese and don’t futz with it. We’re all about representing source information here, not catering to anyone’s sense of typographical aesthetic.
EDIT: To elaborate, there are almost always Japanese versions of English punctuation such as（parentheses）that have giant padding spaces for this exact reason, so inserting extra space is not necessary. If there are ASCII parentheses in a string of Japanese text, I’d immediately grow suspicious and check whether that string was tampered with or if there’s a game of “telephone” going on here causing the data to be ‘degrated’ as it’s copied around. And if not, and they really wanted to just use those ASCII parentheses, well, just copy it exactly as-is anyway.
That’s definitely not what the Japanese do. There used to be a Japanese user around who would cite the JIS standard saying otherwise. Anyway, here’s an example where an ASCII space is intentionally used:
Japanese official sources tend to be inconsistent with whitespaces before and after parentheses. Personally, I insert whitespace before ETI in track titles, and I exclude whitespace before the character voice (CV) component in artist credits. If you don’t like that, you can use a tagger script to change it on your end.