Shift-
JIS encoding is natively used in the Japanese edition of
Windows 9x and
MS-DOS.
Letters supported are:
Kanji (fullwidth)
Hiragana (fullwidth)
Katakana (halfwidth and fullwidth)
ASCII
Fullwidth
Latin letters
Russian
Cyrillic letters
Greek letters
Symbols
However, Latin letters with
Diacritical marks (e.g. ä, ò) are not supported.
Shift-JIS characters are variable width; either 16 bits or 8 bits.
This differs from
UTF-8, which can have characters longer than 2 bytes.
Halfwidth
Katakana and
ASCII fonts are represented in 8 bit characters.
ASCII characters directly map onto Shift-JIS, save the backslash (
\), which is used for the Japanese
Yen currency sign in Shift-JIS.
This node will display fine if displayed as Shift-JIS. Extended
ASCII for
Western European languages will look like an odd mixture of
ASCII and halfwidth
Katakana, however.
Shift-JIS doesn't display
ASCII art properly because all the backslashes become Yen signs.
Japanese characters are frequently displayed as fullwidth
monospace to fit into an invisible grid of squares. To keep consistency, fullwidth English letters were invented so English letters, too, can fit nicely into squares.
One reason for the popularity of
monospace Japanese font is due to the fact that Japanese is sometimes written vertically. In which case, it is essential that fonts have a fixed width for
aesthetics.
See also:
Japanese Character Encoding Formats,
Please use plain text