Dear Hans and other friends: I play a little bit on MKIV's Chinese support and find it is incomplete. It has some serious problems, and lack important features as well. Well, I know it from mk.pdf that Chinese support is under construction, so in this email I just want to give some Chinese horizontal typesetting suggestions for development (vertical typesetting are more frequently used in Hongkong, Taiwan and Japan, so maybe people from there are eager to help): first, a features many Chinese people like: a lot of Chinese users write essays using full-width punct (that is, a punct mark is as the same size as the Chinese characters) and I found that the puncts are compressed well in context with good penalty settings(although there are minor problems in the pdf). however, sometimes it is up to the publisher which kind of punct marks are to be used, and usually many scientific books and papers use half-width puncts. so I think a new feature should be added to map all the Chinese puncts into english while at the same time, a space should be added after the English punct marks. that is, changing 中文，中文 into 中文, 中文 notice the space in the second example there is an opentype feature called hwid, but it should not be used because: - it changes the English alphabets as well - most of the time the function in most Chinese fonts is missing or buggy - it does not automatically add the space These are the minor problems in the mk.pdf: - pp118, penultimate example, box 2, line1, the ' punct mark should not appear at the end of the line - pp118, ultimate example, box 2, line2, in fact, if you want do perfect Chinese typesetting, all the puncts which begin a line or end a line should be closed to the margin line which makes the type block look good (especially when watch the right or left edge of the type block closely) while this ' has many space before it. In English, it is quite easy and the good old tex does a good job because all the letters and puncts are designed carefully, but in Chinese things are much difficult because all the glyphs including the puncts in all the Chinese fonts have the same width, and which makes the problem worse is that different Chinese fonts have different positions for these puncts. So a dynamic way which calculates the most left edge and most right edge of a punct glyph should be used, and it is not available in luatex:( will it be added later? second, and the most important, on the bilingual typesetting: nowadays English words are frequently used in Chinese, so great care must be taken to handle it. many Chinese users write their manuscript in one of the two ways: 中文 English 中文 or 中文English中文 The first way looks good when using a editor with mono space font and the second way is convenient for one to type. So both users will happy if both ways get the same result in context. in MKII, users are forced to use such kind of expression which drives them crazy and should be avoided: 中文English\ 中文 A small skip should be left between Chinese and English which makes the result much better. usually the space is a quarter of a chinese character width. A TeX expression should like: \hspace{0.25em plus 0.125em minus 0.08em} but I think it is better to introduce a \setupxxxwidth for the user. The last important thing for English and Chinese bi-lingual typesetting is that: do not use English glyphs in Chinese fonts because: - recently English glyphs in most of the Chinese fonts are ugly - users have no right to modify the Chinese fonts - many other reasons so when set up a Chinese typeface, it is better to leave a feature for the user to choose the accompany english typeface. while typesetting, Chinese typography rules do not interfere with the english one, that is, chinese part and english part use their own line break model. here are two bugs in recent context: - 中文 English English English 中文will produce 中文EnglishEnglishEnglish中文, the spaces between english words are all missing. - the following script produce an error: Invalid field id penalty for node type glyph (1). Here is a sample: \definefontfeature[chinese][mode=node,script=hang,lang=zht,script=hani,lang=dlft] \definefontsynonym[songti][name:AdobeSongStd-Light][features=Chinese] \definefontsynonym[Serif][songti] definetypeface[song][rm][serif][songti] \setupbodyfont[song,12pt,rm] \starttext 中文 English: 中文 \stoptext third, indenting: Chinese paragraphs are indented with two Chinese characters, and we also indent the first paragraph. context is so powerful that it is easy to do these kind of things, thank you:) and i think it is better to write it into the Chinese typesetting module? Urgency: bi-lingual typesetting > fix the wrong panelty > map the english punct maps as an alternative > indenting > puncts should be close to margin lines. I am eager to see full support for chinese and other Asian languages (and I am eager to help too), and i hope my suggestions here are helpful to the developers. I am grateful to Hans, Taco and and many other guys (eg. Zhichu Chen) that did a very good job in recent MKIV Chinese support. Thank you for your time and effort for continuous contributions! Yue Wang