MKIV Chinese typesetting

* MKIV Chinese typesetting
@ 2008-01-27  9:51 Yue Wang
  2008-01-28  2:17 ` Arthur Reutenauer
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 13+ messages in thread
From: Yue Wang @ 2008-01-27  9:51 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: ntg-context

Dear Hans and other friends:

I play a little bit on MKIV's Chinese support and find it is
incomplete. It has some serious problems, and lack important features
as well.
Well, I know it from mk.pdf that Chinese support is under
construction, so in this email I just want to give some Chinese
horizontal typesetting suggestions for development (vertical
typesetting are more frequently used in Hongkong, Taiwan and Japan, so
maybe people from there are eager to help):

first, a features many Chinese people like:
a lot of Chinese users write essays using full-width punct (that is, a
punct mark is as the same size as the Chinese characters) and I found
that the puncts are compressed well in context with good penalty
settings(although there are minor problems in the pdf).
however, sometimes it is up to the publisher which kind of punct marks
are to be used, and usually many scientific books and papers use
half-width puncts.
so I think a new feature should be added to map all the Chinese puncts
into english while at the same time, a space should be added after the
English punct marks. that is, changing
中文，中文
into
中文, 中文
notice the space in the second example
there is an opentype feature called hwid, but it should not be used because:
- it changes the English alphabets as well
- most of the time the function in most Chinese fonts is missing or buggy
- it does not automatically add the space
These are the minor problems in the mk.pdf:
- pp118, penultimate example, box 2, line1, the ' punct mark should
not appear at the end of the line
- pp118, ultimate example, box 2, line2, in fact, if you want do
perfect Chinese typesetting, all the puncts which begin a line or end
a line should be closed to the margin line which makes the type block
look good (especially when watch the right or left edge of the type
block closely) while this ' has many space before it. In English, it
is quite easy and the good old tex does a good job because all the
letters and puncts are designed carefully, but in Chinese things are
much difficult because all the glyphs including the puncts in all the
Chinese fonts have the same width, and which makes the problem worse
is that different Chinese fonts have different positions for these
puncts. So a dynamic way which calculates the most left edge and most
right edge of a punct glyph should be used, and it is not available in
luatex:( will it be added later?

second, and the most important, on the bilingual typesetting:
nowadays English words are frequently used in Chinese, so great care
must be taken to handle it. many Chinese users write their manuscript
in one of the two ways:
中文 English 中文
or
中文English中文
The first way looks good when using a editor with mono space font and
the second way is convenient for one to type. So both users will happy
if both ways get the same result in context.
in MKII, users are forced to use such kind of expression which drives
them crazy and should be avoided:
中文English\ 中文
A small skip should be left between Chinese and English which makes
the result much better. usually the space is a quarter of a chinese
character width. A TeX expression should like:
\hspace{0.25em plus 0.125em minus 0.08em}
but I think it is better to introduce a \setupxxxwidth for the user.
The last important thing for English and Chinese bi-lingual
typesetting is that: do not use English glyphs in Chinese fonts
because:
- recently English glyphs in most of the Chinese fonts are ugly
- users have no right to modify the Chinese fonts
- many other reasons
so when set up a Chinese typeface, it is better to leave a feature for
the user to choose the accompany english typeface.
while typesetting, Chinese typography rules do not interfere with the
english one, that is, chinese part and english part use their own line
break model.
here are two bugs in recent context:
- 中文 English English English 中文will produce 中文EnglishEnglishEnglish中文,
the spaces between english words are all missing.
- the following script produce an error: Invalid field id penalty for
node type glyph (1). Here is a sample:
\definefontfeature[chinese][mode=node,script=hang,lang=zht,script=hani,lang=dlft]
\definefontsynonym[songti][name:AdobeSongStd-Light][features=Chinese]
\definefontsynonym[Serif][songti]
definetypeface[song][rm][serif][songti]
\setupbodyfont[song,12pt,rm]
\starttext 中文 English: 中文 \stoptext

third, indenting:
Chinese paragraphs are indented with two Chinese characters, and we
also indent the first paragraph. context is so powerful that it is
easy to do these kind of things, thank you:)
and i think it is better to write it into the Chinese typesetting module?

Urgency: bi-lingual typesetting > fix the wrong panelty > map the
english punct maps as an alternative > indenting > puncts should be
close to margin lines.

I am eager to see full support for chinese and other Asian languages
(and I am eager to help too), and i hope my suggestions here are
helpful to the developers.
I am grateful to Hans, Taco and and many other guys (eg. Zhichu Chen)
that did a very good job in recent MKIV Chinese support. Thank you for
your time and effort for continuous contributions!

Yue Wang
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