> > At start-up time, XeTeX is in UTF-8 character mode, and Japanese
> > characters like the geta mark are treated as normal characters,
>
> That is what I thought, but probably I am imagining something
> incorrectly. I read the fontspec guide, and thought why do we now
> need CJK if XeTeX can access the system fonts directly in UTF8 mode?
With latest XeTeX versions it's probably no longer necessary (I've
just received the EuroBachoTeX proceedings which has a description of
the new XeTeX features).
> I changed the main font to a Japanese one and lo and behold, the
> Roman letters were now in that font. However, XeTeX gave an error as
> soon as I tried to enter Japanese characters also.
It should work just fine indeed. The latest XeTeX extensions even
allow for proper font switching, this is, using separate fonts for CJK
and non-CJK scripts.
> from what point does the XeTeX engine no longer handle Japanese
> characters if it can handle them as normal characters in the input?
If you deactivate XeTeX's native UTF-8 handling, you get results
similar to plain LaTeX.
> The other thing that is still confusing me about XeTeX and CJK
> together is what font names are required where. I'll have to check
> this, but it seems the NFSS names no longer work for me at all for
> setting the CJK environment, and the default Wadalab gets chosen
> instead. The XeTeX and xCJK font commands however do as I expect and
> this is how I am working successfully at the moment with XeTeX and
> macros.
I haven't experimented with this, so I can't comment.
> > \AtBeginDocument{\XeTeXinputencoding "bytes"}
> >
> > at the very end; this means that only after \begin{document} CJK takes
> > care of UTF-8 handling.
>
> Excuse me, to clarify can you explain: does this mean that at begin
> document the mode becomes "bytes" and that CJK requires "bytes" mode
> to handle the CJK characters? I take it that "bytes" mode means
> encoding-independent, as opposed to the default of UTF-8
> interpretation of a sequence of bytes?
xCJK.sty needs that, yes.
Werner
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