Re: Chinese

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

Richard Gabriel wrote:

> Hello Hans,
>
> to be honest: I don't speak Chinese and don't know much about it.
> A few days ago, I was told that we'll let translate some of our 
> documents (XML) into Chinese and Japanese and I 'll have to typeset them.
> So I started playing with Chinese in ConTeXt. I've reported the 
> results which other users (e.g. Tobias) have also noticed.
> In fact, all the sample Simplified Chinese documents I've tested it on 
> were easily convertible to CP936 (GBK) and could be typeset. This 
> doesn't mean that you shall not extend the Unicode support, I only 
> think I will not hardly require it... :-)
>
> But yet another question: What about Japanese? I've made only small 
> research so far, but unlike Chinese, there's almost no information 
> about Japanese in TeX. How much of work would be to adjust the current 
> "chinese" ConTeXt module for Japanese? What would you need for it?
> [Of course, meanwhile I'll investigate some other ways of typesetting 
> Japanese...]

it's all a matter of fonts and specs; handling those languages is not 
that complex

the main complication is in the encodings (related to the input) and 
utf8 makes sense as common encoding; context (newtexexec) has provisions 
for runtime recoding

what do the chinese users think of it ...

Hans