Matthew Huggett wrote: > I asked about Japanese a while back. Hans requested more information on > encodings, fonts, etc. I don't know enough about these things or > ConTeXt to know what is needed exactly. > From what I've read, unicode is not that popular in Japan itself. ...
Unicode wasn't that popular because Unix-like operating systems used EUC as encoding, and Microsoft used their own invented Shift-JIS encoding. So there is still a lot of digital text out there written in these encodings, and a lot of tools still use it. But I think that if you want to write new texts, using Unicode shouldn't be a problem for most users. I guess that most editors supporting Asian encodings also make it possible to save in UTF-8. I think nowadays it's easier to find a Unicode enabled editor than it is to find a Shift-JIS/EUC editor! (Well, on Windows anyway...). Since ConTeXt already supports UTF-8, I don't see a reason to make thinks more difficult than they already are by writing text in other encodings. When I look at the source of the Chinese module, the most difficult part for me to understand is the part about font encoding, the enco-chi.tex file, and the use of \defineuclass in that file. I guess it has to do something with mapping the written text to the font. If I understand correctly, the Chinese module doesn't use Unicode fonts, but GBK or Big5 encoded fonts. I guess that if you want to make a proper Japanese module, you'll need to support JIS or Shift-JIS encoded fonts. But on the other hand, maybe we don't need to support that since there are a lot of Japanese Unicode fonts available. I use WinXP, and there we have msmincho.ttc and msgothic.ttc, which are both Unicode fonts. I also use kochi-mincho.ttf and kochi-gothic.ttf, which are both freely available Japanese Unicode fonts. And Cyberbit is a Unicoded font as well. Commercially available fonts by Dynalab (Dynafont Japanese TrueType collection is quite cheap and very good) are also Unicode fonts. Again, I don't think we should make it difficult for ourselves by trying to support non-Unicode fonts while unicoded Japanese fonts are easy to use and widely available. > Typesetting Japanese could be more complicated than Chinese because of > the concurrent use of four writing systems The fact that Japanese uses four writing systems is not really a problem. Hiragana and Katakana (Kana) are just part of other Unicode ranges than Kanji/Chinese. Things might get difficult if you want to use different fonts for Kana than you are using for Kanji. Then you need to assign a different font to a different Unicode range. But I have no idea why somebody wants to do such a thing! Just using Unicode and a Japanese Unicode font will take care of things. If you type Romaji/Latin characters in the example I posted yesterday, they get printed in CMR. I did some tests and I could change the font in any other font I wanted to, just by using the normal ConTeXt font mechanisms. So I guess it is easy to mix Japanese fonts with normal Latin fonts. > I guess I need to track down a few sample documents. I tried to turn up > some info on Japanese typesetting rules but had no luck. The only info I got is from Ken Lunde's CJKV book, where he mentions some rules about CJK line breaking. Also, some characters are allowed to protrude in the right margin. I have some OTP's for Omega which handles all of this. They can be seen here: http://www.math.jussieu.fr/~zoonek/LaTeX/Omega-Japanese/doc.html At first I wanted to use Omega with ConTeXt so that I could use these OTP's, but Omega isn't really stable. With the ConTeXt example that I posted yesterday, I am already able to write Japanese in UTF-8, use a Unicoded Japanese font in ConTeXt, and get Japanese output. I hope the hard part is already behind me! :-) The only thing that still puzzles me is how I can add interglyph space so that TeX can break the lines. If someone can help, I would really appreciate it! My best, Tim _______________________________________________ ntg-context mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
