Re: Wanting to learn plain TeX

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

At 05:10 PM 9/6/00 +0200, Robert F. Beeger wrote:

>Just because of being curious about this one: How can this work? I remember 
>of having heard once that the writen Chinese language consists of 2000000 
>or even more symbols, of which each one stands for a word. Are Unicode 
>characters used here or a special mapping from ASCII to Chinese. I also ask 
>myself what sort of keyboard the chinese guys use when they want to type 
>some text in Chinese.

Wang Lei is the person to answer this best. When I implemented chinese, i
did so based on the info he gave me, since the documentation that comes
with other tex implementations is in chinese and therefore unreadable for
me. So, i implemented chinese from scratch. There are more problems
involved than fonts. Currently fonts are dealt with by splitting them up in
=<256 glyphs and using the two byte chars to invoke them. In context the
first byte (char) triggers a font switch [all bytes>128 are made active].
Then the font+char combination is fed in a unicode handler [on top of
font-uni] where spacing and linebreaking is optimized. 

The complications are in: different encoding/font specific numbering
schemes, split labels, mixed chinese latin, and more. This is a rather
multi dimensional problem: font/encoding/language/... with languages within
languages and so. 

Concerning keying, there are special keyboards and free tools for editing.
Kind of funny to see you windows become chinese, due to characters that are
intercepted and mapped onto chinese or whatever. Of course there is emacs. 

Some day I will use omega for this, but first I will finish the current
implementation.  

Hans
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