Duospaced font

Last updated
Visual comparison of a duospaced CJK font (Migu 2M) versus a monospaced font (Consolas). Comparison of duospaced vs. monospaced font.svg
Visual comparison of a duospaced CJK font (Migu 2M) versus a monospaced font (Consolas).

A duospaced font (also called a duospace font) is a fixed-width font whose letters and characters occupy either of two integer multiples of a specified, fixed horizontal space. Traditionally, this means either a single or double character width, [1] although the term has also been applied to fonts using fixed character widths with another simple ratio between them. [2]

Contents

These dual character widths are also referred to as half-width and full-width, where a full-width character occupies double the width of a half-width character. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spacings have more than two different widths. And, unlike monospaced fonts, this means a character can occupy up to two effective character widths instead of a single character width. This extra horizontal space allows for the accommodation of wider glyphs, such as large ideographs, that cannot reasonably fit into the single character width of strictly uniform, monospaced font.

In CJK typography

The idea of a "duospaced" font came from East Asian typography, where the local scripts of CJK characters simply cannot fit into a narrow column used in Latin fixed-pitch fonts. [1] Note that this "duospace" name is mostly a historical (c. 1990) Western distinction; Asian typefaces with such characteristics simply call themselves "monospaced" or "fixed pitch". [3]

CJK monospace fonts typically include halfwidth and fullwidth forms of characters that provide different widths for typesetting. In addition to East Asian characters and such forms, it is common for other technical and pictographic symbols to become duospaced in some East Asian fonts, a phenomenon known as "ambiguous width". [3]

It is a common pitfall for Western programmers to neglect support for such fonts:

With the exception of some Japanese monospace fonts like Source Han Code JP, where a 1.5× width is used as the ideograph width, [6] almost all CJK monospace fonts use 2× as the ideograph width. [3] (In the case of the Korean language, Hangul characters which are usually slightly narrower than the ideographs are made to match them.)

Some CJK monospace fonts with two or more widths are:

In Western typography

Western duospaced fonts are similar in purpose to CJK duospaced fonts, but they are much rarer and less supported. The idea seems to be limited to an iA Writer typeface where the latin characters wmWM have 1.5× widths, so that they retain the traditional letter shape better. [2]

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 Officially a "monospaced font".

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Monospaced font</span> Font whose characters occupy the same amount of horizontal space

A monospaced font, also called a fixed-pitch, fixed-width, or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts with variable-width fonts, where the letters and spacings have different widths.

In internationalization, CJK characters is a collective term for the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, all of which include Chinese characters and derivatives in their writing systems, sometimes paired with other scripts. Collectively, the CJK characters often include Hànzì in Chinese, Kanji and Kana in Japanese, Hanja and Hangul in Korean. Vietnamese can be included, making the abbreviation CJKV, as Vietnamese historically used Chinese characters in which they were known as Chữ Hán and Chữ Nôm in Vietnamese.

Han unification is an effort by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the Han characters of the so-called CJK languages into a single set of unified characters. Han characters are a feature shared in common by written Chinese (hanzi), Japanese (kanji), Korean (hanja) and Vietnamese.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GB 18030</span> Unicode character encoding mostly used for Simplified Chinese

GB 18030 is a Chinese government standard, described as Information Technology — Chinese coded character set and defines the required language and character support necessary for software in China. GB18030 is the registered Internet name for the official character set of the People's Republic of China (PRC) superseding GB2312. As a Unicode Transformation Format, GB18030 supports both simplified and traditional Chinese characters. It is also compatible with legacy encodings including GB2312, CP936, and GBK 1.0.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bitstream Cyberbit</span> Typeface

Bitstream Cyberbit is a commercial serif Unicode font designed by Bitstream Inc. It is freeware for non-commercial uses. It was one of the first widely available fonts to support a large portion of the Unicode repertoire.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Japanese input method</span> Methods used to input Japanese characters on a computer

Japanese input methods are used to input Japanese characters on a computer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Monospace (typeface)</span> Typeface

Monospace is a monospaced Unicode font, developed by George Williams. It is based on the typeface Courier. This font contains 2860 glyphs. It includes characters in the following unicode ranges: Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, IPA Extensions, Spacing Modifier Letters, Combining Diacritical Marks, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Latin Extended Additional, Greek Extended, General Punctuation, Superscripts and Subscripts, Currency Symbols, Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols, Letterlike Symbols, Number Forms, Arrows, Mathematical Operators, Miscellaneous Technical, Control Pictures, Enclosed Alphanumerics, Box Drawing, Block Elements, Geometric Shapes, Miscellaneous Symbols, Alphabetic Presentation Forms, Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms.

A Unicode font is a computer font that maps glyphs to code points defined in the Unicode Standard. The vast majority of modern computer fonts use Unicode mappings, even those fonts which only include glyphs for a single writing system, or even only support the basic Latin alphabet. Fonts which support a wide range of Unicode scripts and Unicode symbols are sometimes referred to as "pan-Unicode fonts", although as the maximum number of glyphs that can be defined in a TrueType font is restricted to 65,535, it is not possible for a single font to provide individual glyphs for all defined Unicode characters. This article lists some widely used Unicode fonts that support a comparatively large number and broad range of Unicode characters.

New Gulim (새굴림/SaeGulRim) is a sans-serif type Unicode font designed especially for the Korean-language script, designed by HanYang System Co., Limited. It is an expanded version of Hanyang Gulrim.

Symbol is one of the four standard fonts available on all PostScript-based printers, starting with Apple's original LaserWriter (1985). It contains a complete unaccented Greek alphabet and a selection of commonly used mathematical symbols. Insofar as it fits into any standard classification, it is a serif font designed in the style of Times New Roman.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Halfwidth and fullwidth forms</span> Alternative width characters in East Asian typography

In CJK computing, graphic characters are traditionally classed into fullwidth and halfwidth characters. Unlike monospaced fonts, a halfwidth character occupies half the width of a fullwidth character, hence the name.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft YaHei</span> Typeface

Microsoft YaHei is a sans-serif gothic typeface created by Founder Electronics and Monotype Corporation under commission from Microsoft. Hinting for the font was undertaken by Monotype Imaging. The CJK ideographic characters were designed by the Founder Electronics foundry's senior designer, Li Qi (齐立).

M<sup>+</sup> FONTS Typeface

M+ FONTS is a series of Japanese fonts designed by Coji Morishita. The "M" stands for "minimum", while the plus sign means "above minimum".

Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms is the name of a Unicode block 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, followed only by the short Specials block at U+FFF0–FFFF. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Halfwidth and Fullwidth Variants.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Source Han Sans</span> Open-source sans-serif CJK typeface

Source Han Sans is a sans-serif gothic typeface family created by Adobe and Google. It is also released by Google under the Noto fonts project as Noto Sans CJK. The family includes seven weights, and supports Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean. It also includes Latin, Greek and Cyrillic characters from the Source Sans family.

Pitch is the number of (monospaced) letters, numbers and spaces in one inch (25.4 mm) of running text, that is, characters per inch, measured horizontally. The pitch was most often used as a measurement of the size of typewriter fonts as well as those of impact printers used with computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Source Han Serif</span> Open-source serif CJK typeface

Source Han Serif is a serif Song/Ming typeface created by Adobe and Google.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Iosevka</span> Typeface

Iosevka is a monospace programming typeface, built declaratively using custom typeface generation software, and with an emphasis on compatibility with CJK characters. It is available under a FOSS license. The default builds are available in two styles of nine weights each, and come with italic and oblique versions. The typeface was designed, however, to be easily configurable by editing textual TOML configuration files in the custom generation software.

References

  1. 1 2 "Font spacing characteristics". IBM Knowledge Center. IBM Corporation. 1990. Retrieved 2017-09-17.
  2. 1 2 Abhimanyu Ghoshal. "iA Writer's 'Duospace' Font: A Better Flow While Retaining The Benefits Of 'Monospace'". The Next Web.
  3. 1 2 3 "UAX #11: East Asian Width". unicode.org. For a fixed pitch font, this width translates to a display width of either one half or a whole unit width. [...] Some characters behave differently in East Asian context than in non-East Asian content. Their default width property is considered ambiguous and needs to be resolved into an actual width property based on context.
  4. ↑ "Offering a solution for Terminal Wide Character issues · Articles". jeffquast.com.
  5. ↑ "Rethinking the spacing detection: Dual Width => Multiple width (#176) · Issues · fontconfig / fontconfig". GitLab.
  6. ↑ Hattori, Masataka (2015-06-11). "Introducing Source Han Code JP". CJK Type Blog. Ken Lunde / Adobe.
  7. ↑ "Predefined Fonts". Oracle. Retrieved 2017-09-17.
  8. 1 2 "TrueType and OpenType fonts". IBM Knowledge Center. IBM Corporation. Retrieved 2017-09-17.
  9. 1 2 "Summary tables for WorldType fonts". IBM Knowledge Center. IBM Corporation. Retrieved 2017-09-17.
  10. ↑ Hattori, Masataka (2015-06-11). "Introducing Source Han Code JP". CJK Type Blog. Ken Lunde / Adobe.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.