Hans wrote:

that's tricky. the utf handler assumes named glyphs and noone named the 5000 chinese ones so far ... some variant on: ...

\startunicodevector chinese_unicode_page_number_1 getglyph\endcsname{ChineseFont1}{#1}\gobbleoneargument \stopunicodevector

so, then you only need to define the right fonts i.e.

\definefont[ChineseFont1][whateverchinesefont_1]

which has the right glyphs in the right slots

so ... it's actually simple, once you have the fonts split up

probably the getgyph needs to be replaced by a more clever one that handles special chinese thingies,

Wow. At the moment I have no idea how most of the Chinese module or font-handling works, nor how I would implement something using the tricks you describe. I guess I would need some hand-holding if I were to embark on this, I guess also I would need to understand the mechanism used to re-use a TTF font many times with different encodings to create multiple 256 char tfms.

another option is to write another mapper analogue to the ones already there for chinese, i.e. is there some mapping from utf to big5 or so and hook that into the utf handler.

This sounds like something I can at least understand a bit better. I will start here, and see what success I have. Perhaps it will help eventually with an attempt to do it the "right" way above.

(beware, the font-chi modules talk about unicode while actually it's about dedicated mapings resembling a unicode approach; this \defineucharmapping stuff)

Yes indeed, that had me going... :-) Oh well. Thanks for the insight, I'll feedback further. Duncan