- From: Stuart Woodward <stuart@gol.com>
- Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2000 16:49:39 +0900
- To: <nelocsig@egroups.com>, "www" <www-international@w3.org>
> Could you please explain the difference between "hankaku" and "zenkaku". In Shift JIS (and "Uni"code!) for katakana (phonetic) characters (& alphanumerics) there are two *different* character codes which represent the same chararcter. E.g. the word te-ri-bi (television) can be written in either hankaku (han=half width, single byte) or zenkaku (zen=full width, double byte) katakana. This is a holdover from the hardware word processor world which could only print in two sizes. So, if you search for "teribi" in half width characters you may not get any hits for pages which wrote it in full width characters even though to the reader they are the same word. It's bit like if a search engine was case sensitive. Some search engines do the conversion for you, some don't. See also: http://cns-web.bu.edu/pub/djohnson/web_files/i18n/japanese.html
Received on Tuesday, 15 February 2000 02:45:14 UTC