Add explanation for "halfwidth" term usage in typography#742
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| <p its-locale-filter-list="en" lang="en" class="checkme">In everyday Chinese usage, the term "<a href="#term.halfwidth" class="termref">halfwidth</a>" is often used to refer to ASCII characters, Latin letters, European numerals, or Western symbols. In typography, however, "halfwidth" and "<a href="#term.fullwidth" class="termref">fullwidth</a>" serve as concepts for measuring character width. Strictly speaking, a character can only be designated as "halfwidth" if its width is precisely half that of a fullwidth character. Since the vast majority of Western fonts used in modern publications are proportional fonts and the widths of individual characters vary, it is inaccurate to collectively label all such characters as "halfwidth".</p> | ||
| <p its-locale-filter-list="zh-hans" lang="zh-hans">在日常用语中，“<a href="#term.halfwidth" class="termref">半角</a>”常被宽泛地用来指代 ASCII 字符、拉丁字母、阿拉伯数字或西文符号。在排版上，“半角”与“<a href="#term.fullwidth" class="termref">全角</a>”是度量宽度的概念，只有在这些字符的宽度为全角字符的一半时，称其为“半角”才严格成立。现代出版物中使用的西文字体，绝大多数是比例字体，各字符宽度并不一致，因此将这些字符一概称为“半角”并不准确。</p> | ||
| <p its-locale-filter-list="zh-hant" lang="zh-hant">在日常用語中，「<a href="#term.halfwidth" class="termref">半形</a>」常被寬泛地用來指代 ASCII 字元、拉丁字母、阿拉伯數字或西文符號。在排版上，「半形」與「<a href="#term.fullwidth" class="termref">全形</a>」是度量寬度的概念。只有在這些字元的字幅為全角字元的一半時，稱其為「半形」才嚴格成立。現代出版物中使用的西文字體，絕大多數是比例字體，各字元寬度並不一致，因此將這些字元一概稱為「半形」並不準確。</p> | ||
| <p its-locale-filter-list="en" lang="en" class="checkme">In everyday Chinese usage, the term "<a href="#term.halfwidth" class="termref">halfwidth</a>" is often used to refer to ASCII characters, including Latin letters, European numerals, and some Western symbols. In typography, however, "halfwidth" and "<a href="#term.fullwidth" class="termref">fullwidth</a>" serve as concepts for measuring character width. Strictly speaking, a character can only be designated as "halfwidth" if its width is precisely half that of a fullwidth character. Since the vast majority of Western fonts used in modern publications are proportional fonts and the widths of individual characters vary, it is inaccurate to collectively label all such characters as "halfwidth".</p> |
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There are a lot of interesting quirks buried in here.
Historically, half-width characters were encoded as a single byte and full-width characters as two bytes in legacy encodings (such as GB2312, Big5, ISO-2022-x, etc.). The bytes corresponded to screen positions on terminals or line printers (where the fonts can never be proportional).
These relationships were encoded into the East Asian Width properties in Unicode, since the Unicode character encodings don't preserve the byte-width. Character "width" still mattered for screen layout. In Asian typography and fonts, half-width characters generally have glyphs that are half the width--the better to preserve the layout grid--while Western/non-Asian fonts use proportional glyphs (making grid management much more difficult). Mixing fonts, as is done in modern systems, makes the half-width/full-width distinction artificial and frequently misleading.
To that extent, I agree with your definition here, except to note that it is somewhat font-dependent. The half/full distinction often would apply if a Chinese font were used for the characters and it does remain a property of certain characters to be "half" or "full" width with regard to Unicode. You might want to include more of the above history/explanation (suitably corrected where needed)?
(Not important to Chinese, but Japanese has half-width katakana characters that are drawn narrowly for UX which have roots in 8859 national character standards, where the narrow katakana were 1-byte and full-width characters in Shift-JIS were two bytes)
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Thank you for your thoughts, Addison! In today's TF telecon, we decided to keep this note simple and not include too much historical content, intending to merge it as it is now.
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Fix #732.
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