[EMAIL PROTECTED] scripsit: I've formatted my reply to your question as a FAQ entry. FAQkeeper, please take note.
Q. Wouldn't it have made more sense to simply have introduced a few new combining characters in plane 0, such as: "make bold", "make italic", "make script", "make fraktur", "make double-struck", "make sans serif", "make monospace" and "make tag". This would not only have achieved the same effect (and with the same space requirements too, at least for things like "bold uppercase A" in UTF-16), but with much greater flexibility (in that you could also make _other_ characters bold too, and you could create combinations of the attributes not currently represented). A. It would have provided too much flexibility, and would have tempted people to use such characters to create "poor man's markup" schemes rather than using proper markup such as SGML/HTML/XML. The mathematical letters and digits are meant to be used only in mathematics, where the distinction between a plain and a bold letter is fundamentally semantic rather than stylistic. > > I still haven't figured out what "fullwidth" means though. I don't really > understand in what way a "full width full stop" (FF0E) is different from a > "full stop" (002E), etc. I _have_ downloaded, and read in entirety, the code > chart document for FF00-FFEF, and nothing in that document explains to me > why these characters are necessary. Does anyone have any clues on that one? Fullwidth characters are used for backward compatibility with CJK character sets, which have a notion of "fullwidth" and "halfwidth" characters. Fullwidth characters are the same width as individual CJK characters and fit into a uniform square grid. They should not be used except for compatibility. -- John Cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Most languages are dramatically underdescribed, and at least one is dramatically overdescribed. Still other languages are simultaneously overdescribed and underdescribed. Welsh pertains to the third category. --Alan King
