narrowcharacter

Narrowcharacter is a term used to describe a character or glyph that occupies a narrow display width in text rendering, typically one monospaced column, as opposed to wide or double-width characters that occupy two columns in many East Asian fonts. The concept is important for text layout, alignment, and cursor positioning in consoles, terminals, and other monospaced environments.

In typography and encoding, narrow characters are often associated with single-byte representations such as ASCII or Latin-1, whereas wide or full-width characters are linked to multibyte encodings or double-width glyphs found in Unicode for many CJK scripts. Unicode also defines width properties that influence rendering: characters can be wide, fullwidth, halfwidth, or ambiguous, affecting how they are laid out in different locales and fonts.

In programming, narrow character strings typically use 8-bit encodings (for example, char in C and many languages), while wide character strings use 16- or 32-bit encodings (such as wchar_t, UTF-16, or UTF-32). In UTF-8, a single character may occupy one to four bytes, but its display width can still be narrow or wide depending on the character and the font.

Implications of character width include text wrapping, alignment in tables, and cursor positioning in terminal prompts. Accurate handling of narrow and wide characters is important for cross-platform text rendering, accessibility, and data processing where character positions must be counted precisely.

See also: half-width character, full-width character, East Asian width, wide character, CJK typography, Unicode.