developer is officially maintaining the package.
The rationale for changing this from "tech-pkg" to "pkgsrc-users" is
that it implies that any user can try to maintain the package (by
submitting patches to the mailing list). Since the folks most likely
to care about the package are the folks that want to use it or are
already using it, this would leverage the energy of users who aren't
developers.
This is a module to provide equivalent feature as wcwidth(3) and
wcswidth(3). This also provides mblen(3) equivalent subroutine.
mbwidth() and mbswidth() are provided subroutines corresponding
wcwidth(3) and wcswidth(3) in C language. The prefix "mb" expresses
that they handles "multibyte character" in C meaning, i.e., character
encoding specified by LC_CTYPE locale.
These subroutines are used to get the width of characters on terminal.
Though most characters have width of 1, there are exceptions.
Fullwidth characters are characters with width of 2. Most of east
Asian characters such as Hiragana, Katakana, Hangul, Han Ideogram
are fullwidth. Combining characters are characters with width of 0.
Unicode has many combining characters like diacritical marks. There
are languages which need combining characters such as Thai and
Vietnamese.
Thus, if you would like to format international texts on terminal,
you will have to be aware of variation of character width and will
want to use this module.
