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Comment by jhawthorn | Hacker News Reader

I've been using ｆｕｌｌｗｉｄｔｈ　ｃｈａｒａｃｔｅｒｓ. Due to their simplicity to convert to and read. This page of course has the advantage of more variety in characters.

Fullwidth conversion code in ruby:

  "string".tr(' !-~', "\u3000" + (0xFF01...0xFF5f).to_a.pack('U*'))

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I wondered what was up with the weird kerning.

    Nａｍ
    Nam

(By the way, they seem to break tab-indentation for pre formatted text in the markdown.)

Full width characters have a fun habit of breaking most things. Even more so than unicode.

Since they are only used in CJK languages the majority of programmers are unaware of them. The seperate code points between half-width and full-width mean that you need a decent unicode library. Otherwise a user could spoof another user.

One cool feature is it lets you write monospaced even if you do not control the font. Since there are full-width codepoints for most programming symbols.

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