Re: Writing Japanese using ConTeXt

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

At 17:24 09/06/2003 -0600, Matt Gushee wrote:

> > Typesetting Japanese could be more complicated than Chinese because of
> > the concurrent use of four writing systems:

dunno, could also be a challenge; as long as tagging is done properly i see 
no real problem there

>On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 06:33:49PM +0200, Tim 't Hart wrote:
> >
> > Unicode wasn't that popular because Unix-like operating systems used EUC as
> > encoding, and Microsoft used their own invented Shift-JIS encoding.
>
>There were also cultural/political reasons, with perhaps a touch of Not
>Invented Here syndrome. But that's a different story.

same as in china: many encodings alongside unicode

> > Since ConTeXt
> > already supports UTF-8, I don't see a reason to make thinks more difficult
> > than they already are by writing text in other encodings.
>
>On the face of it that makes sense. But I don't think it's safe to make
>a blanket assumption that the text in a ConTeXt document will originate
>with the creator of the document, or that it will be newly written.
>Also, UTF-8 support is still a bit half-baked on Unix/Linux systems.

i'm sure that wang lei (on this list) can help you out; if i'm right he is 
aware of japanese font demands

> > I guess that if you want to make a proper Japanese module, you'll need to
> > support JIS or Shift-JIS encoded fonts.
>
>This would be a good idea for Type 1 font support. It seems to me that
>almost all recent Japanese TrueType fonts have a Unicode CMap.

one of the first things to do is to collect fonts in suitable encodings and 
post them somewhere (or at least post scripts that generate them)

>Can PDFTeX handle TTC files? I know ttf2afm/ttf2pk can process them, but
>I have tried 2 or 3 times to include a Japanese TTC font directly in a
>PDFTeX document, but was never able to make it work.

dunno, maybe dvipdfmx can

>Well, it can be done in stages. I think that any serious attempt to
>support Japanese in ConTeXt should encompass all common encodings. But
>I don't see anything wrong with starting out Unicode-only.

in that case some range mapping should be defined; proper test files, etc

> > > Typesetting Japanese could be more complicated than Chinese because of
> > > the concurrent use of four writing systems
> >
> > The fact that Japanese uses four writing systems is not really a problem.
>
>Maybe it's not a big problem. But it is certainly more complex than
>chinese, since there is a mixture of proportional and fixed-width
>characters, and the presence of Kana and Romaji complicate the
>line-breaking rules.

hm, but as long as the rules are clear, things should be configurable as 
much as possible

> > The only info I got is from Ken Lunde's CJKV book, where he mentions some
> > rules about CJK line breaking.
>
>Yes, Lunde is good, but he doesn't go into enough detail to serve as an
>implementor's guide. I've also searched for more info on this subject;

right, many nice tables and glyphs -)

>my impression is that besides Lunde's books there is really nothing
>available in English. I could probably make some sense out of the
>Japanese works that are available, but it would take up much more time
>than I have.

then ... write it down in a document/manual and make that the test case for 
context; if the manual can be processed we're done!

Hans
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