From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Mon Aug 11 2003 - 13:12:01 EDT
Jill.Ramonsky@Aculab.com scripsit:
I've formatted my reply to your question as a FAQ entry. FAQkeeper, please
take note.
Q. Wouldn't it have made more
sense to simply have introduced a few new combining characters in plane 0,
such as: "make bold", "make italic", "make script", "make fraktur", "make
double-struck", "make sans serif", "make monospace" and "make tag". This
would not only have achieved the same effect (and with the same space
requirements too, at least for things like "bold uppercase A" in UTF-16),
but with much greater flexibility (in that you could also make _other_
characters bold too, and you could create combinations of the attributes not
currently represented).
A. It would have provided too much flexibility, and would have tempted people
to use such characters to create "poor man's markup" schemes rather than
using proper markup such as SGML/HTML/XML. The mathematical letters and
digits are meant to be used only in mathematics, where the distinction
between a plain and a bold letter is fundamentally semantic rather than
stylistic.
>
> I still haven't figured out what "fullwidth" means though. I don't really
> understand in what way a "full width full stop" (FF0E) is different from a
> "full stop" (002E), etc. I _have_ downloaded, and read in entirety, the code
> chart document for FF00-FFEF, and nothing in that document explains to me
> why these characters are necessary. Does anyone have any clues on that one?
Fullwidth characters are used for backward compatibility with CJK character
sets, which have a notion of "fullwidth" and "halfwidth" characters.
Fullwidth characters are the same width as individual CJK characters and
fit into a uniform square grid. They should not be used except for
compatibility.
-- John Cowan jcowan@reutershealth.com http://www.ccil.org/~cowan Most languages are dramatically underdescribed, and at least one is dramatically overdescribed. Still other languages are simultaneously overdescribed and underdescribed. Welsh pertains to the third category. --Alan King
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