tlug: Japanese emails and jlatex under RedHat 6.1

[Matt Gushee <mgushee@example.com>]

Naoki Saito writes:

 > Also, I would like to use jlatex.

If you want *internationalized*, rather than localized TeX, you might
consider the CJK macro package. It provides Chinese/Japanese/Korean
support on top of a standard TeX distribution. Thus, "all" you need
are the TeX distribution, a Japanized ghostscript, and Japanese fonts.

Another plus to CJK is that it's maintained by Werner Lemburg, one of
the principal developers of Freetype, so there is good support for
TrueType fonts. Ooh, I probably shouldn't mention that, Steve Jobs'
spies might be listening. Okay: 



Depends on what you want to do with it, I guess: if you are serious
about TeX and casual about Japanese, I'd go w/ CJK because it works
with very recent TeX distributions such as teTeX 1.0 -- which is based 
on Web2C[1] 7.3, which has good support for some cool features that
are lacking or problematic with earlier versions (I'll be happy to
detail some of those features if you're interested). NTT-jtex is poorly
documented, unsupported, and hopelessly out of date. But you were
probably thinking of ASCII-jtex, or pTeX (don't really understand the
difference, though there apparently is one). The documentation for
that is better -- not much on the web, last I checked, but there are a 
few books about it -- only in Japanese, AFAIK, but perhaps that's your 
native language. It's also widely used and sort-of supported. But if
I'm not mistaken it's based on a fairly old version of Web2C
... v. 6.1 or so?

CJK can be found at any CTAN archive (check out http://www.tug.org/
for a *partial* listing of mirrors), and it's a modest-sized
download. 

Matt Gushee
Portland, Maine, USA
mgushee@example.com

[1] Web2c, for those who don't know, is the most widely-used TeX
implementation for Unix-like platforms. Most distributions you're
likely to find are based on Web2c.
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