Sources
Help build the largest human-edited directory on the web.
Submit a site - Become an editor
Wikipedia. Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Are you an expert in this subject? Join the discussion and share your knowledge at Wikipedia.org.
Fullwidth form
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In CJK computing, graphic characters are traditionally classed into fullwidth (in Taiwan and Hong Kong: 全形; elsewhere: 全角) and halfwidth (in Taiwan and Hong Kong: 半形; elsewhere: 半角) characters. With fixed-width fonts (now called bi-width by Westerners), a halfwidth character occupies half the width of a fullwidth character, hence the name.
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 would be displayed as a small dot matrix, often about 8 pixels wide, and an SBCS (single byte character set) is generally used to encode the characters.
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) because of a practical reason (compatibility with off-the-shelf software), though some systems may use a variable-width or some other form of multi-byte encoding.
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
 |
This computer-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |