Many Japanese fonts have a special fixed-width variant of the standard ASCII latin characters that are half as wide as the font's standard fixed-width for Kanji/Kana characters. This allows you to vertically line up Latin and Japnaese text by simply using 2 Latin chars per Japanese character. This is called something like "half-width latin". There's an accompanying "full-width latin" where the characters are super-wide to line up exactly with each Kanji/Kana character. My question: Is there a special region of Unicode designed to do the same thing for Hangul? Hangul characters are usually much narrower than Kanji, so you would need a narrower hangul-sized Latin to do fixed character alignment.
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64answers:
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A:
Nope. As I understand it Hangul is typeset with proportional-width spaces and punctuation, so the Hangul glyphs don't even line up with each other, let alone interposed Latin and numbers.
bobince
2009-11-03 13:11:01
I've spent a lot of time looking looking at hangul (though I can't actually read it) and I feel confident that the composed hangul glyphs are actually spaced the same in fonts like MS Gulim.
Armentage
2009-11-04 00:36:35
That's as may be, however all the Korean text I've met (and yeah, I can't read it either except for phonetically) has come complete with spaces, brackets, quotes etc. that are a completely different width to the Hangul characters, making nothing line up. I don't think Koreans would expect to see strongly grid-oriented text as is common in Japanese. I *think* the “halfwidth hangul” characters (really just jamo) are only there for legacy charset compatibility.
bobince
2009-11-04 09:20:26
+1. I spend a fair deal of time reading (and trying to make sense of) Hangul and can attest that it's not often monospaced.
Drew Noakes
2010-06-04 16:02:34
+1
A:
You will probably need to use a Hangul font that specifically include half-width Latin glyphs like http://www.ascenderfonts.com/font/batangche-korean.aspx or http://www.ascenderfonts.com/font/dotumche-korean.aspx I think that this is font/glyph specific, not related to the Unicode encodings. The two font URLs above allow you to paste in a line of text so you can try some mixed Latin and Korean text to see if it does what you want.
Michael Dillon
2009-11-03 14:39:29
Yes, I agree with this. I suspect that the presence of full-width and half-width Latin in Unicode are hold-overs from the days of JIS and other Japanese encodings, where fixed width fonts that could be lined up for tabular text was very common. It's very dinosaur (I like to think Tyranasaur) of me to be concerned about this, but I work with a lot of legacy systems that align up text the old fashioned way.
Armentage
2009-11-11 02:17:40