Re: Chinese in utf-8

[Duncan Hothersall <dh@capdm.com>]

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