Talk:Half-width kana

Half-width hiragana

Are there any distinctions between half-width hiragana and full-width hiragana? --84.61.51.114 15:38, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Unfortunately, there is no such thing as "half-width hiragana". Half-width katakana was created as out of necessity (due to computer power limit of past), and because of that, half-width hiragana and kanji were never created. --Revth 02:23, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Half-width hiragana was used in MSX and other old computers. It's also usable on modern computers, even on websites or e-books. --2409:11:43A0:E00:2E4:9AA4:AD68:B42B (talk) 07:38, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

Better explanation or pictures needed

So let me get this straight: socalled halfwidth kana are nothing special encoding-wise, but they were treated special by some display devices. I understand it this way: At the time, 1960s to 1970s, roman characters were usually displayed with a fixed width, but the height occupied more pixels than the width, eg. 5 px wide an 9 px high. “Halfwidth katakana” then were designed to fit into the same space. When double-byte (and flexible-byte) encodings entered the scene there now were fullwidth kana and kanji, which are as wide as high, eg. 10 px by 10 px. Two roman or two “halfwidth kana” glyphs would fit into this space and, indeed, would be displayed that way. Correct? A picture (or more) might help. So the double encoding of katakana characters is sourced in a misconception? — Christoph Päper 12:15, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Yes, basically – it’s about display, not encoding. Unfortunately, much of the text is about encoding, as that’s more complicated.

I’ve added an illustration – カ vs. ｶ – to clarify.

That said, the display forms got confused with how they were encoding, esp. due to double encoding of katakana in Shift JIS; hopefully the current article is clearer.

Thanks for your comments!

—Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 15:40, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

subject of change

I meant "utf-7 is unused", sorry 85.93.118.17 (talk) 07:45, 29 March 2010 (UTC)

Confusing

It is not at all clear from this article what actually constitutes "half-width kana". Is it just to do with the printed/displayed representation of the characters being narrower, or is it also something to do with the encoding only taking one byte rather than two? The article seems to be trying to make some connection between these two things but the connection is never explained. The section "Misunderstanding of JIS X 0201" only serves to further muddy the waters, and appears to directly contradict the lead section. 86.185.72.27 (talk) 02:58, 14 December 2010 (UTC)

The article was pretty confusing; I’ve rewritten it some in this edit and this edit so it’s hopefully clearer.

As the lede hopefully makes clear now, "half-width" strictly means only how the characters are displayed, and has nothing to do with how they are encoded. However, in Shift JIS half-width characters correspond to characters in the JIS X 0201 encoding (a single-byte standard) and full-width characters correspond to characters in the JIS X 0208 encoding (a double-byte standard), which is presumably the cause of the confusion. Hope this clarifies matters!

—Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 15:36, 12 October 2011 (UTC)