Re: Wanting to learn plain TeX

["Mr. Wang Lei" <lwang@amath8.amt.ac.cn>]

On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Hans Hagen wrote:

> >Just because of being curious about this one: How can this work? I remember 
> >of having heard once that the writen Chinese language consists of 2000000 
> >or even more symbols, of which each one stands for a word. Are Unicode 
> >characters used here or a special mapping from ASCII to Chinese. I also ask 
> >myself what sort of keyboard the chinese guys use when they want to type 
> >some text in Chinese.

As I know Chinese language consists more than 100000 characters. But most
of them are used in ancient literature. In fact, if you know about 
3500 - 5000 Chinese character, you can read and write Chinese without
problem. 

Input Chinese in computer needn't special keyboard. If you have
install a Chinese version Windows, you can active the Chinese 
input method by click the input icon or more quickly hit "ctrl+space".
Then you just type the key "a, b, c, ..., z" in your keyboard,
there will be the matched Chinese characters appear and sorted 
by number, you can select them by hit the corresponding number key.
If you have non-Chinese system, for example, English Windows, 
Linux/Unix, you should install the Chinese fonts(usually TTF)
and the input software first and do as above to input Chinese.
So Input Chinese needn't special keyboard but the special software.

> 
> Wang Lei is the person to answer this best. When I implemented chinese, i
> did so based on the info he gave me, since the documentation that comes
> with other tex implementations is in chinese and therefore unreadable for
> me. So, i implemented chinese from scratch. There are more problems
> involved than fonts. Currently fonts are dealt with by splitting them up in
> =<256 glyphs and using the two byte chars to invoke them. In context the
> first byte (char) triggers a font switch [all bytes>128 are made active].
> Then the font+char combination is fed in a unicode handler [on top of
> font-uni] where spacing and linebreaking is optimized. 

Typesetting Chinese have more difficults than other Western languages
in TeX. Although modern Chinese typesetting much like English, there 
are still some difference between them. Hans do good works on them,
ConTeXt now can use Chinese number, set split labels, typesetting
Chinese (both simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese), etc.   

Wang

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Mr. Wang Lei                      Phone: 86-10-62541687 
Institute of Applied Mathematics  Email: lwang@amath8.amt.ac.cn
Chinese Academy of Science        Address: P.O.Box 2734, Beijing, 100080  
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