In reply to Emphasis on other scripts:
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have a traditional method of emphasis as well as Western-derived bold, oblique, and underlining. When text is typeset vertically a character can have a small dot or lachrymal brush stroke on the right side. This serves much the same purpose as italics for emphasis in modern Latin-alphabet typesetting. It’s not seen very much when text is typeset horizontally, however it’s still possible. For Japanese there’s the likelihood of clashing with ruby (furigana) annotations, so that the two don’t usually cooccur with the same text. The Wikipedia article on Japanese typographic symbols notes their use.
Another emphasis mark in Japanese is the 米印 komejirushi or ‘rice symbol’: ※. It’s named after its resemblance to the character meaning ‘rice’: 米. Although it’s often described as being like an asterisk, it’s actually more like a bullet because it doesn’t have a cross-reference function. Instead it appears before text that is supposed to be particularly important.
This is a short example paragraph. This short paragraph contains some ordinary text. The ordinary text in this paragraph is not terribly important.
※ This line of text is particularly important and the reader is advised to pay attention to it.
This paragraph is ordinary like the first example paragraph. Once again, this text is not deserving of any special emphasis.
I’m not sure if this is used in Chinese and Korean typesetting, but I think I’ve seen it at least in some Korean flyers around town in Vancouver and Honolulu.