Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms is a

Unicode block A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes (code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ...

U+FF00–FFEF, provided so that older encodings containing both halfwidth and fullwidth characters can have lossless translation to/from Unicode. It is the second-to-last block of the

Basic Multilingual Plane In the Unicode standard, a plane is a contiguous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecimal ...

, followed only by the short Specials block at U+FFF0–FFFF. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Halfwidth and Fullwidth Variants. Range U+FF01–FF5E reproduces the characters of

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

21 to 7E as fullwidth forms. U+FF00 does not correspond to a fullwidth ASCII 20 (space character), since that role is already fulfilled by U+3000 " ideographic space". Range U+FF61–FF9F encodes halfwidth forms of

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...

and related punctuation in a transposition of A1 to DF in the

JIS X 0201 JIS X 0201, a Japanese Industrial Standards, Japanese Industrial Standard developed in 1969, was the first Japanese electronic character set to become widely used. The character set was initially known as JIS C 6220 before the JIS category reform. ...

encoding – see half-width kana. The range U+FFA0–FFDC encodes halfwidth forms of compatibility jamo characters for

Hangul The Korean alphabet is the modern writing system for the Korean language. In North Korea, the alphabet is known as (), and in South Korea, it is known as (). The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs ...

, in a transposition of their 1974 standard layout. It is used in the mapping of some IBM encodings for Korean, such as IBM code page 933, which allows the use of the Shift Out and Shift In characters to shift to a double-byte character set. Since the double-byte character set could contain compatibility jamo, halfwidth variants are needed to provide round-trip compatibility. Range U+FFE0–FFEE includes fullwidth and halfwidth symbols.

Block

The block has variation sequences defined for East Asian punctuation positional variants. They use (VS01) and (VS02): An additional variant is defined for a fullwidth zero with a short diagonal stroke: U+FF10 FULLWIDTH DIGIT ZERO, U+FE00 VS1 ().

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block:

References

{{Unicode navigation Unicode blocks Latin-script Unicode blocks Kana *Halfwidth

Block

History

See also

References