Half-width kana

For example, the usual (full-width) form of the katakana ka is カ while the half-width form is ｶ. Additionally, half-width hiragana is included in Unicode, and it is usable on Web or in e-books via CSS's font-feature-settings: "hwid" 1 with Adobe-Japan1-6 based OpenType fonts.

Half-width kana characters are not generally used today, but find some use in specific settings, such as cash register displays, on shop receipts, Japanese digital television and DVD subtitles, and mailing address labels.

This is formally incorrect, however – this JIS standard simply specifies that katakana can be stored in these locations, without specifying how they should be displayed; the confusion is because in early computing, the characters stored here were in fact displayed as half-width kana – see confusion, below.

JIS X 0201 was developed in 1969, a time when computers were generally incapable, both by software design and hardware resources, of representing the thousands of Chinese-based kanji characters used in Japanese.

As a compromise, this standard encoded katakana (only – not hiragana or kanji) as a small set of characters, assigned in the upper byte value range of 0x80–0xFF.

This compromise led many to consider "half-width kana" visually unattractive, and causes problems for many computer programs today.

The Japanese version of Windows 3.1 used both half-width and full-width katakana of MS Gothic in its user interface.

The Japanese version of Windows 95 used half-width katakana of MS P Gothic in its user interface.

Thus in Shift JIS, Latin characters and katakana have two encodings with two separate display forms, both half-width and full-width.

Please note that the blank first cell represents a non-existent character in JIS, A0; but a fullwidth double parenthesis ｠ in Unicode, U+FF60.