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I was intrigued by this question: What do you do if a genkoyoshi line ends with e.g. す。」? and its answer.

I'm not any good at this 原稿用紙 but I remember being told for some types of forms (which I thought followed the same rules) that you need to put the [濁点]{だくてん} (for some reason always called ten-ten and maru in the classes and contexts I heard them) into separate boxes. Was I being misled / is this still current practice for some sort of form?

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virmaior
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1 Answers1

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The rule you mentioned does not apply to 原稿用紙 for novels and articles. Never.

However, you may be instructed to place 濁点（゛） and 半濁点（゜）into a separate box, when you have to fill some legacy paper forms at banks or government offices.

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This is because 濁点 and 半濁点 consume an extra byte if you encode hankaku katakana strings into old encodings such as JIS, Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, and they have to count the number of bytes.

In my opinion, this is a very bad tradition of the fixed-length-string era, and should disappear at once.

naruto
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  • Thanks. I agree they should disappear. It's really annoying to forget and put something in only to realize I've ruined another form. – virmaior Jun 12 '14 at 09:31