> My feeeling is that half-width kanas behave like Latin letters and
> do not even have to follow the ideographic composition square to
> line up with them (unlike standard kanas).
It's exactly the half of the ideographic square.
> So effectively their line breaking behavior is very different.
Maybe. However, the most important property is to be able to start a
new line after (almost) any half-width kana.
> They are harmonized to be used along with other alphabetic
> scripts. In fact they may even not be really "half-width" but
> proportional.
Do you have an example for that? I've *exclusively* seen fonts where
half-width kanas are really half the CJK width.
> If rendered in vertical lines, they could be either rotated (just
> like Latin letters),
Actually, I haven't seen half-width kanas ever used in vertical
context. Does this exist?
> So IMHO, those "half-width" letters are in fact to be considered as
> another separate script, for typographic purpose.
Yes, for typographic purposes. But typographic issues are not covered
by Unicode. AFAIK, the existence of half-width kanas in Unicode is
purely for backwards and round-trip compatibility.
Werner
Received on Tue Apr 28 2015 - 03:10:40 CDT
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