Site icon Leonid Mamchenkov

When monospace fonts aren’t: The Unicode character width nightmare

I don’t deal with Unicode and other character encoding on the daily basis, but when I do, I need every piece of information that has been written on the subject.  Hence the link to this interesting issue :

As long as you stick to precomposed Unicode characters, and Western scripts, things are relatively straightforward. Whether it’s A or Å, S or Š – so long as there are no combining marks, you can count a single Unicode code point as one character width. So the following works:

	aeioucsz
	áéíóúčšž

Nice and neat, right?

Unfortunately, problems appear with Asian characters. When displayed in monospace, many Asian characters occupy two character widths.

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