, or kana spelling, is a style of romanization of Japanese originally devised for entering Japanese into while using a Western QWERTY keyboard. In Japanese, the more formal name is , literally "Roman character kana conversion". One conversion method has been standardized as JIS X 4063:2000 (Keystroke to KANA Transfer Method Using Latin Letter Key for Japanese Input Method); however, the standard explicitly states that it is intended as a means of input, not as a method of romanization. Wāpuro rōmaji is now frequently employed in general-purpose computer input as well as word processing, but the name lives on. Wāpuro-style romanizations are also frequently used by native speakers of Japanese in informal contexts, as well as by many fans of anime and other aspects of Japanese culture. A common characteristic of these (often online) cases is the avoidance of hard-to-type circumflexes or macrons. Also, some ambiguities in spelling may exist. Spellings are seen that would fail to produce the desired kana when typed on a computer, for example failure to distinguish between (properly entered as "zu") and (properly entered as "du"). Spelling conventions In practice, there are as many variants of wāpuro rōmaji as there are manufacturers of word processing and IME software. Many aspects of Hepburn, Kunrei and Nihon-shiki romanizations are accepted, so that both si (Kunrei/Nihon-shiki) and shi (Hepburn) resolve to . Some conventions, however, differ from standard romanizations: Owing to the difficulty of entering diacritics like macrons or circumflexes with standard keyboards (as well as the ambiguity of ō, etc., which in Hepburn can represent either or ) long vowels are almost universally entered following kana spelling rules; thus, kou for and koo for . The Nihon-shiki forms of romanization take precedence over other romanizations. Thus du usually produces rather than . Small kana can be entered by prefacing them with an x or l, e.g. xa for , or ltu for . This is commonly employed for modern katakana combinations like , which would be entered texi, thi, or t'i. However, on some systems l is treated the same as r when followed by a vowel or "y". , and may also be romanized as jya, jyu and jyo respectively. This matches the kana closely, but is used by neither Nihon-shiki/Kunrei (which would be zya, zyu, zyo) nor Hepburn (ja, ju, jo). The Hepburn spelling tchi for may be rejected, and cchi may be required instead.