CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

Character Spanning

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Character Spanning

In the West, we usually think of tabs in terms of the whitespace that serves as an alternate

to the use of spaces.

*

Common tabs include le, right, centered, and decimal. A spanning

tab is unique in that it adjusts the spacing between every character that appears before it.

Most CJKV words, with the exception of those for Korean and Vietnamese, are strung to-

gether with no intervening spaces, so adjusting the inter-character spacing becomes man-

datory. Under most implementations and conditions, CJKV characters—kana, hangul,

and ideographs—have equal set widths (that is, they are considered full-width), which

eectively means that every character occupies the same amount of typographic space.

†

Latin characters are typically spaced proportionally, meaning that the widths of charac-

ters dier depending on their shape and typeface design. e Latin typeface used for the

text of this book, Adobe Minion Pro Regular, is proportionally spaced, but you will oc-

casionally nd a mono-spaced font, Courier, used for code samples or other purposes.

In addition to properly span lines of text, there are special ways to span CJKV text on a

much smaller scale than the text of entire paragraphs. In Japanese, this is known as 

 (kintō wari) or  (kintō waritsuke). is technique is most oen used when

listing names. Table 7-24 provides an example of a ...