Scott,
>Is "Cancel" considered a foreign word in this context? Do the katakana
>characters in question really spell out Cancel phonetically? Instead of
>having a kanji to represent Cancel or hiragana to spell out the Japanese
>word for Cancel?
That's correct. "Cancel" is a foreign word (phonetically its kyanseru).
>So in the SJIS character set there are two different sets of the same
>katakana characters: half width and full width? Are the full width
>literally twice as wide, or does this more vaguely refer to them being
>only somewhat wider with better resolution?
Again, spot on. Half-width katakana occupy only half the display width of
the equivalent full-width katakana.
Half-width characters have the same height as full-width characters but
occupy half their width.But I may be wrong on this...
>Do hiragana and/or kanji come in both half and full widths too?
Nope. Only full-width.
>So the half width katakana are in the 0x80-0xFF range, what we used to
>call "extended ASCII"? And the full width katakana (plus all hiragana
>and kanji and everything else) are encoded with multiple bytes (lead
>byte + trail byte(s)) in the 0x0100-0xFFFF range?
Again, you got it. But it depends on the encoding.
In the case of SJIS,
Half width characters are in the range 0xA1 -0xDF (161 - 223)
And full-width characters are represented by 2 bytes :
First byte : 0x81-0x9f, 0xE0-0xEF
Second byte : 0x40-0x7E, 0x80-0xFC
>Also, would it be possible for someone to post the SJIS byte sequences
>for a few basic strings like Cancel, Details, Help, etc. It would be
>interesting just to play around with these for now.
As I mentioned in my earlier email, we are going to put stuff out with the
SDK.
But if you have a Japanese ROM, then a few strings are (make sure that the
graffiti indicator is showing the the katakana character -- click on the
3rd soft-button before you begin typing...by default we come up in hiragana
mode).
enter this on your palm
Cancel --- kyanseru
Note --- komento
Address --- adoresu
Copy --- kopi- [type the hyphen at the end]
Keyboard --- ki-bo-do
Enjoy,
--vivek
