Richard Gabriel wrote:
Hello Hans,
to be honest: I don't speak Chinese and don't know much about it. A few days ago, I was told that we'll let translate some of our documents (XML) into Chinese and Japanese and I 'll have to typeset them. So I started playing with Chinese in ConTeXt. I've reported the results which other users (e.g. Tobias) have also noticed. In fact, all the sample Simplified Chinese documents I've tested it on were easily convertible to CP936 (GBK) and could be typeset. This doesn't mean that you shall not extend the Unicode support, I only think I will not hardly require it... :-)
But yet another question: What about Japanese? I've made only small research so far, but unlike Chinese, there's almost no information about Japanese in TeX. How much of work would be to adjust the current "chinese" ConTeXt module for Japanese? What would you need for it? [Of course, meanwhile I'll investigate some other ways of typesetting Japanese...]
it's all a matter of fonts and specs; handling those languages is not that complex the main complication is in the encodings (related to the input) and utf8 makes sense as common encoding; context (newtexexec) has provisions for runtime recoding what do the chinese users think of it ... Hans