Re: Writing Japanese using ConTeXt

[Matthew Huggett <mhuggett@zam.att.ne.jp>]

Tim 't Hart wrote:

>Recently, I've made the 'unwise' decision to start studying Japanese next
>year, and of course I want to keep on using ConTeXt to write my school
>papers. [....] So I decided to find a way to
>write Japanese in ConTeXt.
>
>First I tried using the eOmega/ConTeXt combination since I have some great
>OTPs for it, but soon found out that Omega is still "the TeX of the future",
>in other words, not the "TeX of today" and extremely unstable.
>
>Then I decided to try ConTeXt's UTF-8 support. I created the following test
>  
>
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.  The 
most common encodings here are
a) iso-2022-jp (7bit)
b) japanese-iso-8bit (a.k.a euc-japan-1990, euc-japan, euc-jp)
c) japanese-shift-jis (shift jis 8bit; common under MS Windows)
"Describe Language Environment" under MULE in Gnu Emacs gives some info. 
 Ken Lunde of Adobe has a book or two on processing Japanese.

Typesetting Japanese could be more complicated than Chinese because of 
the concurrent use of four writing systems:
a) Kanji (Chinese Characters)
b) Hiragana (Syllabic script for representing grammatical endings and 
words for which Kanji are not commonly used.)
c)  Katakana (Syllabic script for representing foreign words, some 
scientfic words (flora, fauna), and for emphasis)
d) Romaji -- lit.  "Roman Characters" (Sometimes foreign languages, 
especially English, are represented in latin script)  It is more common 
than you might imagine.


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.

best wishes,

Matt