"Seak, Teng-Fong" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Chinese (as well as Japanese and Korean) can also be written from right to
> left, even though this isn't very common nowadays. Actually, in tradition,
> Chinese is written from top to the bottom, then from right to left. But I
> don't think Latex is able to support this :-)
Theoretically speaking it is of course possible. However, dimensions
and
other TeX registers are scarce resources and if you implement vertical
typesetting only by macros, then you are more likely to encounter
"TeX capacity exceeded..." errors. But you can check arabtex macro
package where RTL typesetter is implemented all by macros.
(So arabtex package does not require special TeX compilers and can
typeset
both Arabic and Hebrew. While hebrew macro package requires eTeX and/or
TeX--Xet and only supports Hebrew.)
In fact, the standard TeX compiler only has LTR_TTB (characters are
written from left to right to form a line; lines are placed from top to
bottom to form a page) primitive. The eTeX compiler has both LTR_TTB
and RTL_TTB primitives. The pTeX compiler (Japanized version, not
available from CTAN) and possibly the hTeX compiler have LTR_TTB and
TTB_RTL primitives. The omega compiler supports LTR_TTB, RTL_TTB,
TTB_RTL (for Chinese, Japanese, etc.) and TTB_LTR (for Mongolian)
primitives.
Regards,
SMiyata
