["Unicode"] Re: Why doesn't Ideographic (ID) in UAX#14 have half-width katakana?

[Philippe Verdy]

I just gave an opinion about what I have seen. I don't know if this is
correct or preferred.
Half-width text is a modern invention that does not obey the traditions
used in CJK composition squares (which should also be rendered vertically
by default, even if today on the Internet this is not the case, it is still
the case for printed texts).
They started being used at the same time that Latin letters started to be
mixed in text, and computers appeared that offered only half-width
character cells in monospaced fonts (to see other ideographs, those old
computers needed to allocated two cells and use separate fonts for the left
side and the right side)

I don't know if whitespace is prefered or not in halfwidth text, I have
seen both...

2015-04-28 10:04 GMT+02:00 suzuki toshiya <mpsuzuki at hiroshima-u.ac.jp>:

> 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 <m_kato at ga2.so-net.ne.jp>:
> >
> >> 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
> >>
> >
>
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