At 17:24 09/06/2003 -0600, Matt Gushee wrote:
Typesetting Japanese could be more complicated than Chinese because of the concurrent use of four writing systems:
dunno, could also be a challenge; as long as tagging is done properly i see no real problem there
On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 06:33:49PM +0200, Tim 't Hart wrote:
Unicode wasn't that popular because Unix-like operating systems used EUC as encoding, and Microsoft used their own invented Shift-JIS encoding.
There were also cultural/political reasons, with perhaps a touch of Not Invented Here syndrome. But that's a different story.
same as in china: many encodings alongside unicode
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.
On the face of it that makes sense. But I don't think it's safe to make a blanket assumption that the text in a ConTeXt document will originate with the creator of the document, or that it will be newly written. Also, UTF-8 support is still a bit half-baked on Unix/Linux systems.
i'm sure that wang lei (on this list) can help you out; if i'm right he is aware of japanese font demands
I guess that if you want to make a proper Japanese module, you'll need to support JIS or Shift-JIS encoded fonts.
This would be a good idea for Type 1 font support. It seems to me that almost all recent Japanese TrueType fonts have a Unicode CMap.
one of the first things to do is to collect fonts in suitable encodings and post them somewhere (or at least post scripts that generate them)
Can PDFTeX handle TTC files? I know ttf2afm/ttf2pk can process them, but I have tried 2 or 3 times to include a Japanese TTC font directly in a PDFTeX document, but was never able to make it work.
dunno, maybe dvipdfmx can
Well, it can be done in stages. I think that any serious attempt to support Japanese in ConTeXt should encompass all common encodings. But I don't see anything wrong with starting out Unicode-only.
in that case some range mapping should be defined; proper test files, etc
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.
Maybe it's not a big problem. But it is certainly more complex than chinese, since there is a mixture of proportional and fixed-width characters, and the presence of Kana and Romaji complicate the line-breaking rules.
hm, but as long as the rules are clear, things should be configurable as much as possible
The only info I got is from Ken Lunde's CJKV book, where he mentions some rules about CJK line breaking.
Yes, Lunde is good, but he doesn't go into enough detail to serve as an implementor's guide. I've also searched for more info on this subject;
right, many nice tables and glyphs -)
my impression is that besides Lunde's books there is really nothing available in English. I could probably make some sense out of the Japanese works that are available, but it would take up much more time than I have.
then ... write it down in a document/manual and make that the test case for context; if the manual can be processed we're done! Hans ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE | pragma@wxs.nl Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: +31 (0)38 477 53 69 | fax: +31 (0)38 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- information: http://www.pragma-ade.com/roadmap.pdf documentation: http://www.pragma-ade.com/showcase.pdf -------------------------------------------------------------------------