Re: setuptex changes in minimals

[Yue Wang <yuleopen@gmail.com>]

Hi, list:

Well, TeX is evolving rapidly these years (especially in the LuaTeX world).
So there are many things that Chinese typographers never imagine about
in the past can now be solved thanks to LuaTeX's development.

For example:
- Now we can use Lua to detect the character code. so it is possible
to assign different fonts for latin, CJK, CJK-ext A, CJK-extB. font
switching is easy and elegent. This is not possible in tex82.
- It is ugly to produce a paragraph whose last line only consists one
Chinese character. In order to avoid that, tex82 programmers should
write very complicated macros. So many developers here tend to ignore
this problem. However, in LuaTeX, this is quite easy. It is simple to
scan the position before the punctuation and \par in lua, and insert a
line break penalty there.
- Punctuation compression. In the past this is not easy to do (a lot
of macros should be defined), and because each Chinese fonts are so
distinctly designed, their punctuations' positions in the character
box are different. So different parameters should be applied when
different fonts are involved in typesetting. However, LuaTeX make it
possible to calculate character bounding box information, so
punctuation compression is as easy as re-setting the punctuation
width.

There are many more examples, and these are just three. But we can see
that with the development of TeX engine (especially the open-up of TeX
engine), users might consider better ways for old solutions, and even
request for possibilities they never thought about before. So it is
possible for different users to provide different specifications.

But we (me, Li Yanrui, Chen Zhichu) as the board members of the
Chinese TeX Society, will try our best to organized the typesetting
discussion on local forums, taking different opinions into
consideration, and later provide a complete specification as long as
we can.

Chinese support in ConTeXt is not easy, we should thank all the
developers who contribute to our language (esp, Hans, Taco and
Wolfgang), their innovation and hardworking make Chinese typesetting
in ConTeXt possible, and drastically improve the performance of font
loading. Though the current solution is not perfect (eg. there are
many more things we should fix and implement, and the current font
loading time is still a bit too long), I think with the current fast
pace, we will have a very prospective solution near luatex 1.0:)

Yue Wang


On 5/9/09, Yanrui Li <liyanrui.m2@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 4:02 PM, Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl> wrote:
> > Yue Wang wrote:
> >>
> >> On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 2:20 AM, Yanrui Li <liyanrui.m2@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Sorry!
> >>>
> >>> s/MkIV have not support Chinese typesetting now / MkIV have not
> >>> support Chinese typesetting well now/g
> >>
> >>
> >> We can start a fork of scrp-* on code.google.com/p/ctex-kit,
> >> making a usable version, and later ask Hans to merge back into ConTeXt.
> >
> > it all depends how scrp evolves as it has to deal with more issues too; i
> > will not merge code that i don't fully understand but experimenting does not
> > hurt; one problem with script stuff is that (in the future) it might be
> > closely cooperate with other mechanisms of context (it used to be part of
> > the font analyser, now it's plugged in elsewhere but even that might change,
> > for instance when in upcoming versions of luatex we have a bit more control)
> >
>
> What I have done is only experiment. I will try my best to follow the
> evolves of the
>  scrp-* files until that day, when MkIV support Chinese typesetting well, comes.
> I have to introduce MkIV to Chinese users and make them paying close attention
> to it in this way.
>
> > also, some issues will be dealt with in other code in the future (i simply
> > cannot touch all code at the same time) so don't expect mkiv to be finished
> > before 2012 (when luatex 1 is ready); it's a stepwise process and it's only
> > driven by context (i.e. generic code only shows up when context code works
> > okay);
> >
> > anyhow, as long as nobody tells me what the expected behaviour is, with test
> > code etc i can;t fix anything; one complication (e.g. with chinese) is that
> > over the last few year is got conflicting requests; now, if there are
> > multiple ways to deal with it, then i can implement variants but only if i
> > know the exact conventions (with proper names for them)
> >
>
> Yes. It is a key reson that we are still not familiar with MkIV well
> now. But with
> in-depth understanding of MkIV, maybe many suggestions will be post to you.
> Of course these suggestions should be collected according actual demands by
> Chinese TeX users group.
>
> > for instance when i found out that cjk-korean is not the same as cjk-chinese
> > (one of them) i split the machinery so we're not talking cjk here, but very
> > specific needs; after the split i never tested chinese (no samples) and no
> > one else propbably did that either
> >
> > keep in mind that context is not meant for one language but for many and
> > that when possible mechanisms need to be able to used mixed; there will
> > never be exclusive solutions for one languages unless it's a very
> > specialized module
> >
> > anyhow, we can best follow the same route as with other language / script
> > support
> >
> > - we need consistent specs, or maybe multiple specs as variants
> > - as well as test files for each such case
> > - and then we can look into what can be improved or added
> >
>
> I think that maybe this needs a very long time until CJK users know what each
> other needs. But three years should be enough :)
>
> --
> Best wishes,
> Li Yanrui
> ___________________________________________________________________________________
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>
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