Re: MKIV Chinese and English typesetting

["Dohyun Kim" <nomosnomos@gmail.com>]

2008/3/25, Yue Wang <yuleopen@gmail.com>:
> > Dear Hans and other friends:
>  >
>  >  I am a Chinese user of ConTeXt. Recently, I tried ConTeXt MkIV and
>  >  test its Chinese  typesetting. I am very glad to see MkIV can access
>  >  my linux OS TTF&OTF fonts and give a good face of my article about
>  >  lines breaking. But on the bilingual typesetting, such as Chinese
>  >  sentences and English words appearance in a article at the same time ,
>  >  I found there are no good methods to solve the  problem of  setting
>  >  fonts for them respectively. Now I had to handle it in this way:
>  >
>
>
>
> Well, I am aware of that problem (I think Hans is aware of that
>  too....). See the relative thread in mailing list archive (Jan 2008, I
>  think). I mentioned the problem again in another mail to Hans this
>  morning because more messages like this appeared on Chinese TeX
>  related web forums these days (It's a good thing, more Chinese TeX
>  Gurus love to play ConTeXt and LuaTeX ^_^).
>
>  There are many ways to deal with that problem. in fact, add your \en
>  macro into the method.hani() function of  font-otf.lua is a quick and
>  dirty hack. But I think there should be other more elegant ways to
>  deal with it. perhaps:
>  - assign an "english font" feature to "\definefontfeature" or
>  "\definefontsynonym". When define a CJK typefaces, the corresponding
>  English typeface can be defined by the user. switch to another font
>  when needed (using the similar method as in font-otf.lua).
>  - map the CJK part of a Chinese typeface and Latin part of a English
>  typeface to one single virtual font, Use this virtual font for
>  typesetting.
>
>  Both of them are not hard to do technically compared what had been
>  done before.  So maybe we should wake Hans up to continue the CJK
>  support? Zhichu Chen and I are eager to help whenever a localization
>  problem is occurred.
>

FYI.  I have recently tried to implement Korean typesetting with LuaTeX,
using the second method you have mentioned, that is virtual font mechanism.
It is, however, not for ConTeXt but for plain TeX, because I am
ignorant about ConTeXt.

http://people.ktug.or.kr/~nomos/mine/luatexko.tex
http://people.ktug.or.kr/~nomos/mine/luatexko.lua
http://people.ktug.or.kr/~nomos/mine/luatextt.lua

On current stage, one of important features missing is supporting
opentype GSUB, which now I am trying to understand how to implement.

For testing, you have to install UnBatang.ttf, the most popular truetype font
for Korean language. You can download this font from
http://kldp.net/frs/download.php/1425/un-fonts-core-1.0.tar.gz
or you may already have it if you use debian or ubuntu linux system.

Then just make a document as follows and compile it with `luatex' command
%%%%%
\input luatexko
... some Korean document including english characters ...
\bye
%%%%%

I hope my effort could contribute to developing CJK typesetting with LuaTeX.

Dohyun Kim
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