Unicode has a Technical Report that discusses the "width" property of
characters. Go to www.unicode.org.
As I understand it, Japanese has fullwidth Latin characters because they
have a width comparable to the Japanese ideographic characters, which tend
to be wider than the normal widths of the glyphs for Latin characters.
The fullwidth Latin characters were included in Unicode for compatibility
(round trip integrity) with JIS character sets.
Ed Hart
Edwin F. Hart
edwin.hart@jhuapl.edu
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
11100 Johns Hopkins Road
Laurel, MD 20723-6099
USA
+1-443-778-6926 (Baltimore area)
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-----Original Message-----
From: TAKAHASHI Makoto [mailto:mktakaha@system.hitachi.co.jp]
Sent: Monday, November 27, 2000 20:27
To: Unicode List
Subject: RE: Japanese @ in html
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bailly Manokl [mailto:mbailly@uchrony.be]
> Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2000 1:48 AM
> To: Unicode List
> Subject: RE: Japanese @ in html
>
>
> the usual unicode character for @ is x0040
> the character used with japanese text @ is xFF20
>
> ??????????
>
In Japanese encoding such as ISO-2022-JP, Shift_JIS and euc_jp,
we can use both letters corresponding x0040 and xFF20.
In older implementations Japanese characters have double witdh to
latin characters. So we call Japnese characters "zenkaku" (Full width).
And we call Latin characters "Hankaku" (Half width).
There must be some reason, but I do not know why, JIS defines zenkaku
Latin characters and some symbols such as @, $. So unicode defined
"Halfwidth and Fullwidth forms" for compatibility I suppose.
TAKAHASHI Makoto
hobbit.makoto@nifty.ne.jp
http://homepage1.nifty.com/hobbit/english/
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