Japanese characters are not rendered in the same size relative to riman text as other iPad apps

Textastic is a coder's editor. So, like for example TextMate on the Mac, it relies on Monospaced fonts and the fact that each character has the same width. This is not true for Japanese characters - so after some testing I decided to display them at 60% of their size so that they don't overlap. That's better than displaying nothing at all but Textastic really works best with Western/Latin characters.

With the Courier New font and the largest font size, I feel OK with this problem. Still it would be great if Japanese characters are render in double width rather than the same width to alphabets. like vim, emacs or eclipse. Usualy in code editor, we see Japanese with monospace font of double width.

I improved the Japanese character display in Textastic 2.2 - it uses the same height as the western characters but 68% of the width so it's much more readable. I will submit this update to Apple soon. This is similar in effect to the workaround for TextMate described here: http://blog.macromates.com/2006/faking-cjk-support/

Oh actually I use the TextMate AND this hack on my Mac. Sounds promising. That's not the perfect solution, yet I know you can't spend so much effort just to support a minority language for us :) Thank you for quick response, I'm looking forward to the release!

If it was easy to fix I would implement it correctly. But right now, all the calculations for drawing and cursor positioning etc. in the editor control are based on the assumption that every character has the same width. I would basically have to rewrite the editor to use CoreText for drawing and coordinate calculation if I wanted to support all unicode characters and unicode characteristics. I think this would make everything much slower.

I didn't really expect it would become popular in Japan :)