Pander,
<<Too bad many fonts do not offer ō, at least fonts that support both
Latin and Japanese. Your example nicely separates these by using
different fonts. In that case I can refrain from using that math
workaround. >>
I use the XeTeX interchar solution for that in my book. I use Palatino
Linotype as main font, but it lacks a lot of extended latin characters,
such as ǒ (o with caron). Luckily, FreeSerif's ǒ looks virtually
identical to what Palatino Linotype's "should" look like, so I have ǒ
assigned to interchar class 9, a la
\XeTeXcharclass `\ǒ 9 % o with caron (used in Pinyin orthography
for Chinese)
\XeTeXcharclass `\′ 9 % prime and double prime for time
(minute/second)
\XeTeXcharclass `\″ 9
and simply let XeTeX deal with the switching for me, using
\XeTeXinterchartoks 0 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 1 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 2 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 3 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 4 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 5 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 6 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 7 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 8 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 10 9 = {\extlatinfont}
\XeTeXinterchartoks 255 9 = {\extlatinfont}
(my book uses several character classes, simply because even if some
font has glyphs for certain things, they might in fact be very ugly!
Palatino has glyphs for unicode quotation marks, for instance, but
they're horrible. Instead, I make XeTeX swap in Adobe Caslon Pro and
things look peachy)
<<Very nice. Perhaps this can become a single macro that that will work
in both vertical and horizontal mode. Then it will be a completely
robust implementation. Is this specific to XeLaTeX or fontspec? Where
should this macro be included? The current ruby package or fontspec
package? >>
The code, as is, relies on fontspec, so technically it should work in
other fontspec-supporting TeX flavours (such as LuaTeX). However, I
never tested that, so I honestly don't know =) If it had to be moved to
a package, I'd say move it to the ruby package, but it would have to
become aware of horizontal vs. vertical text direction.
<<As I don't have 'Kozuka Mincho Pro R' I cannot contribute more to your
example. What free high quality fonts are out there that support
vertical mode like 'Kozuka Mincho Pro R' does? Is 'Kozuka Mincho Pro R'
free? Please have a look free-japanese-fonts.pdf which I have assembled.
Which fonts in that overview do any of you know of, are also of the
quality of 'Kozuka Mincho Pro R'? Is there a way, e.g. with ttx -d /tmp
/usr/share/fonts/blahblahblah.ttf to find this out? >>
It's not free, but for non-commercial purposes it comes for free with
Adobe's acrobat reader. For commercial purposes, it also comes with
every normal windows/mac Adobe product.
You can use TTX to determine which features are supported but they're a
bit fragmented. The easiest method I know of is windows's extended font
properties method, which installs into windows and gives you lots of
additional "properties" tabs when you check a font file's properties,
amonst which is the list of supported opentype features per script.
As for your PDF of free fonts, I know most of these, but one very
important thing you may want to consider is whether or not a font is
useful for actually writing Japanese. Kana-only fonts, for instance, are
basically just toy fonts. They serve no practical purpose, and I'm not
quite sure what the people who make them think they're making, but
Japanese font, they make not.
Limited-kanji fonts, too, are of questionable use. Hakushu offers free
version of their fonts, for instance, but these are essentially the
"shareware" versions of their real fonts, and only contain 1000 kanji,
making them useless for actual Japanese text. You won't be able to use
them for something even as basic as writing out the いろは poem, for
instance. (Their real fonts cost between $100 and $200 each, if you buy
then separately. And package deals don't start until $600 =)
On a note of completeness, you seem to be missing two rather important
fonts: Hanazono (http://fonts.jp/hanazono/) and HAN NOM
(http://vietunicode.sourceforge.net/fonts/fonts_hannom.html). The first
is a large freeware alternative to the common OS-supplied gothic/mincho
fonts, and the second is a full CJK-ExtA+B implementation, and while it
does not use the Japanese kanji, but Chinese zi, it is an excellent
fallback font for rare or old characters. In addition, you're also
missing Code2000/2001/2002, which is perhaps not the prettiest, but
certainly more complete than most fonts on that list! =P
- Mike
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