In the days of computer terminals and text mode computing, characters were normally laid out in a grid, often 80 columns by 24 or 25 lines. Each character were displayed as a small dot matrix, often about 8 pixels wide, and an SBCS (single byte character set) was generally used to encode characters of western languages.
For a number of practical and aesthetic reasons, Han characters would need to be twice as wide as these fixed-width SBCS characters. These "fullwidth characters" were typically encoded in a DBCS (double byte character set), although less common systems used other variable-width character sets that used more bytes per character.
In Unicode, if a certain grapheme can be represented as either a fullwidth character or a halfwidth character, it is said to have both a fullwidth form and a halfwidth form.
Examples
| Proportional form | Fullwidth form |
|---|---|
| ★OK★ | ★ＯＫ★ |
| Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet | Ｌｏｒｅｍ ｉｐｓｕｍ ｄｏｌｏｒ ｓｉｔ ａｍｅｔ |
| Halfwidth form | Fullwidth form |
| ﾌｧｽﾞ･ｷﾞﾀｰ | ファズ・ギター |
See also
References
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Last updated on Thursday July 17, 2008 at 09:42:04 PDT (GMT -0700)
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