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Half-width kana
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Half-width kana
Half-width kana (半角カナ, Hankaku kana) are katakana characters displayed compressed at half their normal width (a 1:2 aspect ratio), instead of the usual square (1:1) aspect ratio. For example, the usual (full-width) form of the katakana ka is カ while the half-width form is ｶ. Additionally, hiragana may be displayed half-width on the Web or in e-books via CSS's font-feature-settings: "hwid" 1 with Adobe-Japan1-6 based OpenType fonts. Finally, half-width kanji is usable on modern computers, and is used in some receipt printers, electric bulletin board and old computers.
Half-width kana were used in the early days of Japanese computing, to allow Japanese characters to be displayed on the same grid as monospaced fonts of Latin characters. Half-width kanji were not used. Half-width kana characters are not generally used today, but find some use in specific settings, such as cash register displays, on shop receipts, Japanese digital television and DVD subtitles, and mailing address labels. Their usage is sometimes also a stylistic choice, particularly frequent in certain Internet slang.
The term "half-width kana", which strictly refers only to how kana are displayed, not how they are stored – is also used loosely to refer to the A0–DF (hexadecimal) block where katakana are stored in some character encodings, such as JIS X 0201 (1969) – see encodings, below. This is formally incorrect, however – this JIS standard simply specifies that katakana can be stored in these locations, without specifying how they should be displayed; the confusion is because in early computing, the characters stored here were in fact displayed as half-width kana – see confusion, below.
Half-width kana and 2/3-width kana were used from pre-computer era. In the early computer era, ASCII is defined as a 7-bit character set and has room for 128 characters. However, because this standard was designed for the United States, it does not contain characters and symbols, such as the yen (¥) symbol needed to represent Japanese currency, nor did it include space for characters from other alphabets, such as kana or kanji – thus Japanese characters could not be encoded. Further, Japanese characters, both kana and kanji, are drawn on a square grid, while Latin characters are generally written more narrowly – thus Japanese characters could not be displayed either.
JIS X 0201 was developed in 1969, a time when computers were generally incapable, both by software design and hardware resources, of representing the thousands of Chinese-based kanji characters used in Japanese. As a compromise, this standard encoded katakana (only – not hiragana or kanji) as a small set of characters, assigned in the upper byte value range of 0x80–0xFF. This allowed 8-bit processors to encode and process Japanese text phonetically (as katakana), though without being able to process hiragana or kanji. These katakana characters were in turn displayed as "half-width kana" – a new, unorthodox, narrower form factor to fit the same width as the monospaced Latin alphabets that machines were already printing and displaying. JIS X 0201 is a variant extension of ASCII – it includes additional characters, and does not exactly agree with ASCII on the overlapping part (the Latin character section).
Half-width kana were developed as "... the first Japanese characters encoded on computers because they are used for Japanese telegrams." [1] The Nationwide Banking Data Communication System (全国銀行データ通信システム), the largest funds transfer system in Japan, was established in 1973. Transaction messages between banks could only use Latin, numbers, and half-width katakana within 20 characters. The system is superseded by ZEDI (The Nationwide Banking Electronic Data Interchange System) in 2018, which can handle hiragana and kanji with variable length characters.
To make katakana fit into the narrower cell area allowed, some compromises were made. For example, the diacritics dakuten and handakuten are treated as separate characters instead of being part of the preceding character. This compromise led many to consider "half-width kana" visually unattractive, and causes problems for many computer programs today.[citation needed]
Another use of half-width kana is to save space. The Japanese version of Windows 3.1 used both half-width and full-width katakana of MS Gothic in its user interface. The Japanese version of Windows 95 used half-width katakana of MS P Gothic in its user interface. It was replaced by full-width kana of MS UI Gothic, which was present in the Japanese version of Windows 98 and later; a little narrower than MS P Gothic.
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Half-width kana AI simulator
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Half-width kana
Half-width kana (半角カナ, Hankaku kana) are katakana characters displayed compressed at half their normal width (a 1:2 aspect ratio), instead of the usual square (1:1) aspect ratio. For example, the usual (full-width) form of the katakana ka is カ while the half-width form is ｶ. Additionally, hiragana may be displayed half-width on the Web or in e-books via CSS's font-feature-settings: "hwid" 1 with Adobe-Japan1-6 based OpenType fonts. Finally, half-width kanji is usable on modern computers, and is used in some receipt printers, electric bulletin board and old computers.
Half-width kana were used in the early days of Japanese computing, to allow Japanese characters to be displayed on the same grid as monospaced fonts of Latin characters. Half-width kanji were not used. Half-width kana characters are not generally used today, but find some use in specific settings, such as cash register displays, on shop receipts, Japanese digital television and DVD subtitles, and mailing address labels. Their usage is sometimes also a stylistic choice, particularly frequent in certain Internet slang.
The term "half-width kana", which strictly refers only to how kana are displayed, not how they are stored – is also used loosely to refer to the A0–DF (hexadecimal) block where katakana are stored in some character encodings, such as JIS X 0201 (1969) – see encodings, below. This is formally incorrect, however – this JIS standard simply specifies that katakana can be stored in these locations, without specifying how they should be displayed; the confusion is because in early computing, the characters stored here were in fact displayed as half-width kana – see confusion, below.
Half-width kana and 2/3-width kana were used from pre-computer era. In the early computer era, ASCII is defined as a 7-bit character set and has room for 128 characters. However, because this standard was designed for the United States, it does not contain characters and symbols, such as the yen (¥) symbol needed to represent Japanese currency, nor did it include space for characters from other alphabets, such as kana or kanji – thus Japanese characters could not be encoded. Further, Japanese characters, both kana and kanji, are drawn on a square grid, while Latin characters are generally written more narrowly – thus Japanese characters could not be displayed either.
JIS X 0201 was developed in 1969, a time when computers were generally incapable, both by software design and hardware resources, of representing the thousands of Chinese-based kanji characters used in Japanese. As a compromise, this standard encoded katakana (only – not hiragana or kanji) as a small set of characters, assigned in the upper byte value range of 0x80–0xFF. This allowed 8-bit processors to encode and process Japanese text phonetically (as katakana), though without being able to process hiragana or kanji. These katakana characters were in turn displayed as "half-width kana" – a new, unorthodox, narrower form factor to fit the same width as the monospaced Latin alphabets that machines were already printing and displaying. JIS X 0201 is a variant extension of ASCII – it includes additional characters, and does not exactly agree with ASCII on the overlapping part (the Latin character section).
Half-width kana were developed as "... the first Japanese characters encoded on computers because they are used for Japanese telegrams." [1] The Nationwide Banking Data Communication System (全国銀行データ通信システム), the largest funds transfer system in Japan, was established in 1973. Transaction messages between banks could only use Latin, numbers, and half-width katakana within 20 characters. The system is superseded by ZEDI (The Nationwide Banking Electronic Data Interchange System) in 2018, which can handle hiragana and kanji with variable length characters.
To make katakana fit into the narrower cell area allowed, some compromises were made. For example, the diacritics dakuten and handakuten are treated as separate characters instead of being part of the preceding character. This compromise led many to consider "half-width kana" visually unattractive, and causes problems for many computer programs today.[citation needed]
Another use of half-width kana is to save space. The Japanese version of Windows 3.1 used both half-width and full-width katakana of MS Gothic in its user interface. The Japanese version of Windows 95 used half-width katakana of MS P Gothic in its user interface. It was replaced by full-width kana of MS UI Gothic, which was present in the Japanese version of Windows 98 and later; a little narrower than MS P Gothic.