Re: Re: Chinese

[Tobias Burnus <burnus@gmx.de>]

Hi,

sjoerd siebinga wrote:
> I have made a Ruby-script (for personal use loosely based on Adam's 
> xsl-files) which generates all the encoding- and symbolfiles from a 
> given cmapfile. If someone could send me the ttf-font, I can generate 
> all the necessary encodingfiles for you.
Nice! The recommended (by Xiao Jianfeng) TrueType fonts are given at 
http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Chinese
They are
ftp://ftp.ctex.org/pub/tex/fonts/truetype/ttf/htfs.ttf
ftp://ftp.ctex.org/pub/tex/fonts/truetype/ttf/hthei.ttf
ftp://ftp.ctex.org/pub/tex/fonts/truetype/ttf/htkai.ttf
ftp://ftp.ctex.org/pub/tex/fonts/truetype/ttf/htsong.ttf


Richard Gabriel wrote:
> 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...]
(I don't know much about Japanese.)

In Japanese contrary to Chinese they mix different character sets:
- The Chinese characters ("Kanji"), which seem to make up most of the 
(scientific) text (I'v seen);
in addition some pronouncation based characters are used:
- ("Kana":) Hiragana and Katagana; the former are rather round 
characters in Japanese texts, most prominent should be "の" [means 
something like "of" in English]. They are mostly used for 
suffixes/prefixes where no Chinese equivalent exists. Whereas Katagana 
is used to write words which have been taken from (mostly) European 
languages.

For Kanji there should be no problem with the Chinese module, for Kana 
you need additional support for these characters. Since they are 
pronouncation based, they only consisted of < 50 Characters each.

Tobias

(Hmm, I never though I would end up such deep in linguistics duing my 
PhD theses in physics. But having three Chinese in the group and doing 
regularily some measurements at a research centre in Taiwan - I couldn't 
help picking up something.)