Re: CJK support in ConTeXt

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

Jin-Hwan Cho wrote:

>It's time to discuss the topic "CJK support in ConTeXt" in a more
>public place.

I couldn't agree more! :-)

>The current version of ConTeXt supports Chinese only. But the same
>mechasism enables Korean too. The remaining language is Japanese.
>In some sense, it is possible to support Japanese in the current
>subfont mechanism. But several issues (e.g. Japanese kerning system
>as explained by Okumura) may occur.

Could you explain what these issues are? For the past couple of
months I've been busy writing Japanese support for ConTeXt, based
on the Chinese module. I'm not an expert in this, so I'm sure the
method I used for writing Japanese support is wrong and can be
improved. But for my own personal use it has already proven to be
quite useable. If anyone else is interested in what I've produced so
far, please let me know.

I would like to know what the issues with Japanese kerning are. I do
not know a lot about Japanese typography and would like to know what
the limitations of code based on the Chinese module are.

>My suggestion for supporting CJK characters in ConTeXt is to write a
>new module using e-Omega. Even though e-Omega does not produce PDF
>format directly, there are not much problem with DVIPDFMx.

When I first tried to use Japanese with ConTeXt, I first looked at
e-Omega. The reason I gave up and tried to adapt the Chinese module
was that e-Omega was unstable on my machine. Version 1.23 crashed
immediately (got stuck in a loop producing [] characters). I tried
1.15 because I heard that was more stable. I got some Japanese
output with this version, but when I tried creating more than a
paragraph, it locked as well. But this was all a few months ago.
Does anybody know if things with e-Omega have improved recently?

Anyway, I would like to see a common CJK module for ConTeXt, where
Chinese, Korean and Japanese are based on the same base code. It
doesn't matter to me if it's implemented using subfonts or on using
e-Omega, as long as it's stable and useable. Therefore, I would
like to offer my help in creating CJK support.

My best,
Tim