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History
Katakana was developed in the early Heian Period from parts of man'yōgana characters as a form of shorthand. For example, ka カ comes from the left side of ka 加 "increase". The table below shows the origins of each katakana: the red markings of the original Chinese character eventually became each corresponding symbol.
Computer encoding
In addition to fonts intended for Japanese text and Unicode catch-all fonts (like Arial Unicode MS), many fonts intended for Chinese text also include katakana (such as MS Song).
Katakana have two forms of encoding, halfwidth hankaku (半角, hankaku?) and fullwidth zenkaku (全角, zenkaku?). The halfwidth forms come from JIS X 0201 originally. This includes halfwidth katakana in right side area of ASCII. That is, most halfwidth katakana could be represented by one byte each. In the late 1970s, two-byte character sets such as JIS X 0208 were introduced to represent hiragana, kanji, and other characters. JIS_X_0208 has its own katakana area independently of one-byte character set such as JIS_X_0201. katakana of JIS_X_0208 takes two-byte (at least), so many (especially old) devices output these katakana as two-byte-width. This is why katakana of JIS_X_0201 is called halfwidth and JIS_X_0208, fullwidth. Therefore, most encodings have no halfwidth hiragana.
Although often said to be obsolete, in fact the halfwidth katakana are still used in many systems and encodings. For example, the titles of mini discs can only be entered in ASCII or halfwidth katakana, and halfwidth katakana were commonly used in computerized cash register displays, on shop receipts, and Japanese digital television and DVD subtitles. Several popular Japanese encodings such as EUC-JP, Unicode and Shift-JIS have halfwidth katakana code as well as fullwidth. By contrast, ISO-2022-JP has no halfwidth katakana, and is mainly used over SMTP and NNTP. Halfwidth katakana are commonly used to save memory space.
Katakana was developed in the early Heian Period from parts of man'yōgana characters as a form of shorthand. For example, ka カ comes from the left side of ka 加 "increase". The table below shows the origins of each katakana: the red markings of the original Chinese character eventually became each corresponding symbol.
Computer encoding
In addition to fonts intended for Japanese text and Unicode catch-all fonts (like Arial Unicode MS), many fonts intended for Chinese text also include katakana (such as MS Song).
Katakana have two forms of encoding, halfwidth hankaku (半角, hankaku?) and fullwidth zenkaku (全角, zenkaku?). The halfwidth forms come from JIS X 0201 originally. This includes halfwidth katakana in right side area of ASCII. That is, most halfwidth katakana could be represented by one byte each. In the late 1970s, two-byte character sets such as JIS X 0208 were introduced to represent hiragana, kanji, and other characters. JIS_X_0208 has its own katakana area independently of one-byte character set such as JIS_X_0201. katakana of JIS_X_0208 takes two-byte (at least), so many (especially old) devices output these katakana as two-byte-width. This is why katakana of JIS_X_0201 is called halfwidth and JIS_X_0208, fullwidth. Therefore, most encodings have no halfwidth hiragana.
Although often said to be obsolete, in fact the halfwidth katakana are still used in many systems and encodings. For example, the titles of mini discs can only be entered in ASCII or halfwidth katakana, and halfwidth katakana were commonly used in computerized cash register displays, on shop receipts, and Japanese digital television and DVD subtitles. Several popular Japanese encodings such as EUC-JP, Unicode and Shift-JIS have halfwidth katakana code as well as fullwidth. By contrast, ISO-2022-JP has no halfwidth katakana, and is mainly used over SMTP and NNTP. Halfwidth katakana are commonly used to save memory space.
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