Do you know that in the Japanese language writing system, there are 3 different types of character groups: Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana? And on top of that, in typical modern Japanese text, you frequently observe words in the latin alphabet inserted here and there. This mixed use of characters, you can imagine, requires its own set of typographical conventions.
Typical Japanese text with different types of characters used together.Also, in today's electronic age, we often deal with text in different electronic file formats. This requires, in some cases, knowledge of character sets and encodings in order to avoid or resolve annoying problems of garbled letters or unreadable gibberish. Sometimes, an entire page will be unreadable, and some other times just a small section or scattered individual letters may be affected.
