> 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