Hi all,

 

Alignment with U+3000 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE (the full-width space character) is common practice in Han text.

 

Consider the following text typed using the Microsoft Japanese IME in its default Hiragana configuration:

 

おはようございます

  こんにちは

 おやすみなさい

 

Note that (1) pressing the space keyboard key inserts U+3000 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE and (2) that U+3000 takes up exactly one ideographic square, allowing the text to be perfectly aligned.

 

The same text with each U+3000 IDEOGRAPHIC SPACE replaced with two U+0020 SPACE characters:

 

おはようございます

    こんにちは

  おやすみなさい

 

The ability to specify U+3000 as padding for formatting alignment is highly desirable in Han environments, especially for any text that may be copied and pasted from a terminal emulator into another environment (e.g. a programming text editor such as VS Code or Emacs).

 

Best regards,

 

                 Peter