Budou

Budou is a Python library developed by Google to improve web typography for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages by producing semantically meaningful line breaks. Unlike English, CJK scripts lack spaces or hyphenation cues, often resulting in awkward or unreadable text wrapping on web pages. Budou addresses this issue by segmenting sentences into logical lexical chunks and wrapping each chunk in non-breaking HTML <span> tags. These spans can be styled with CSS to ensure smooth, visually coherent line breaks without splitting words or phrases. The tool supports multiple segmentation backends, including Google Cloud Natural Language API, MeCab, and TinySegmenter, enabling flexibility for both cloud-based and offline processing. Budou can be used via command line, in Python scripts, or integrated into web applications, and it provides advanced options such as caching and entity recognition for improved segmentation accuracy.