RE: Writing Japanese using ConTeXt

["Tim 't Hart" <tim@t-hart.com>]

Matthew Huggett wrote:

> I asked about Japanese a while back.  Hans requested more information on
> encodings, fonts, etc.  I don't know enough about these things or
> ConTeXt to know what is needed exactly.
 
>  From what I've read, unicode is not that popular in Japan itself.  ...

Unicode wasn't that popular because Unix-like operating systems used EUC as
encoding, and Microsoft used their own invented Shift-JIS encoding. So there
is still a lot of digital text out there written in these encodings, and a
lot of tools still use it. But I think that if you want to write new texts,
using Unicode shouldn't be a problem for most users. I guess that most
editors supporting Asian encodings also make it possible to save in UTF-8. I
think nowadays it's easier to find a Unicode enabled editor than it is to
find a Shift-JIS/EUC editor! (Well, on Windows anyway...). 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.

When I look at the source of the Chinese module, the most difficult part for
me to understand is the part about font encoding, the enco-chi.tex file, and
the use of \defineuclass in that file. I guess it has to do something with
mapping the written text to the font. If I understand correctly, the Chinese
module doesn't use Unicode fonts, but GBK or Big5 encoded fonts.  

I guess that if you want to make a proper Japanese module, you'll need to
support JIS or Shift-JIS encoded fonts. But on the other hand, maybe we
don't need to support that since there are a lot of Japanese Unicode fonts
available. I use WinXP, and there we have msmincho.ttc and msgothic.ttc,
which are both Unicode fonts. I also use kochi-mincho.ttf and
kochi-gothic.ttf, which are both freely available Japanese Unicode fonts.
And Cyberbit is a Unicoded font as well. Commercially available fonts by
Dynalab (Dynafont Japanese TrueType collection is quite cheap and very good)
are also Unicode fonts. Again, I don't think we should make it difficult for
ourselves by trying to support non-Unicode fonts while unicoded Japanese
fonts are easy to use and widely available.

> 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.
Hiragana and Katakana (Kana) are just part of other Unicode ranges than
Kanji/Chinese. Things might get difficult if you want to use different fonts
for Kana than you are using for Kanji. Then you need to assign a different
font to a different Unicode range. But I have no idea why somebody wants to
do such a thing! Just using Unicode and a Japanese Unicode font will take
care of things.

If you type Romaji/Latin characters in the example I posted yesterday, they
get printed in CMR. I did some tests and I could change the font in any
other font I wanted to, just by using the normal ConTeXt font mechanisms. So
I guess it is easy to mix Japanese fonts with normal Latin fonts.

> I guess I need to track down a few sample documents.  I tried to turn up 
> some info on Japanese typesetting rules but had no luck.

The only info I got is from Ken Lunde's CJKV book, where he mentions some
rules about CJK line breaking. Also, some characters are allowed to protrude
in the right margin. I have some OTP's for Omega which handles all of this.
They can be seen here:
http://www.math.jussieu.fr/~zoonek/LaTeX/Omega-Japanese/doc.html

At first I wanted to use Omega with ConTeXt so that I could use these OTP's,
but Omega isn't really stable.

With the ConTeXt example that I posted yesterday, I am already able to write
Japanese in UTF-8, use a Unicoded Japanese font in ConTeXt, and get Japanese
output. I hope the hard part is already behind me! :-) The only thing that
still puzzles me is how I can add interglyph space so that TeX can break the
lines. If someone can help, I would really appreciate it!

My best,
Tim