Dear Philippe, Philippe Verdy wrote: > 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). So effectively their line breaking behavior is > very different.
Excuse me, do you mean that a half-width kana text should have the spaces between the words, although full-width (standard) kana text may not have? Could you tell me more about the community preferring such distinction? I think, the orthography proposed to write Japanese language in Kana without Kanji has the word-breaking space, like, http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%95%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%AB:Kana_no_Hikari,_number_1,_page_1.png but it is not officialized, and, it does not distinguish full-width kana and half-width kana. Regards, mpsuzuki > Those "half-width letters" are in fact similar to linear jamos (not > composed into syllabic squares) in the Korean script, and to Bopomofo > letters. And may be we could add the CJK key letters (radicals used for > example in IDS) to this list, or Yi radicals. > > They are harmonized to be used along with other alphabetic scripts. In fact > they may even not be really "half-width" but proportional. They are also > used with non-ideographic punctuation (notably the ASCII punctuation) and > standard SPACE (U+0020). > > If rendered in vertical lines, they could be either rotated (just like > Latin letters), or not (aligned horizontallly like letters in columns of > crosswords, but they may also have proportional height, like in > Latin/Greek/Cyrillic where it is sometimes needed for example with capital > letters with stacked accents, or when using sized spaces) > > So IMHO, those "half-width" letters are in fact to be considered as another > separate script, for typographic purpose. They are "unified" with > non-halfwidth letters, only for collation with minor differences > (plain-text searching and sorting). > > > 2015-04-28 4:20 GMT+02:00 Makoto Kato <[email protected]>: > >> Hi. >> >> http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/proposed.html#ID defines Ideographic >> (ID). Although full-width katakana is included in ID, half-width >> katakana (U+FF66 and U+FF71-U+FF9D) isn't. Why? >> >> Also, Conditional Japanese Starter (CJ, >> http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/proposed.html#CJ) considers >> half-width variants such as half-width katakana letter small a. >> >> >> -- Makoto >> >
