Re: RH - question was: canna + kinput2

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Simon" == Simon Cozens <simon@example.com> writes:

    Simon> I've been using CJK.sty for all my Japanese processing, and
    Simon> it's pretty neat.  And it works fine with Omega, so I'm not
    Simon> sure there are any plans to have "native" CJK support in
    Simon> Omega.

John Plaice told me there are plans (in particular, Omega will support
multidirectional documents much better than CJK can---cf Frank
Bennett's government pubs, they'd be very hard to do in CJK I bet).
But they're not high priority since the native CJK users all seem to
prefer their home grown varieties and the linguists use CJK.

My bet is that what will happen is that the CJK interface, which is
well-designed, will be used over Unicode documents.  You need that
because of the Han unification.  Of course you could simply change
fonts, but since Chinese, Korean, and Japanese tastes differ in many
things, you want to change the whole language environment at once, and
CJK does that for you.  I suspect similar things can be used for other
"same but different" languages (such as the Cyrillic family) to get
real multilingual (as opposed to multiscript) typesetting.  I sure
hope they don't use the bloody "Plane 14 tags"....

>>>>> "Mike" == Mike Fabian <mfabian@example.com> writes:

    Mike> What is TRIP?

I forget what it stands for, but it's the TeX torture test.  If it
passes all the tests in TRIP successfully, it is TeX by definition, no
matter who wrote it in what language etc etc.  If it doesn't, it's
not.

TRIP is why TeX proper changes so little as the decades go by.  Knuth
built it to last, or go obsolete quickly (which is what happened to
Metafont), but not mutate into a monster.  After 20 years it is
finally showing signs of strain.

    Mike> use Ghostscript with the Wadalab CID-keyed fonts which also
    Mike> looks OK. But I could not get Ghostscript to handle the
    Mike> vertical font variants correctly

This is typical "80%" screwage from the people who put the font
distribution together.  They just didn't finish the job.  I know how
to fix it on my one system, but it seemingly varies from distro to
distro, so I evidently don't know how to fix it "right".

    Mike> Unfortunately there seem to be no free Japanese TrueType
    Mike> fonts of comparable quality.

IMO, it is highly unlikely there will ever be.  For one thing, by the
time somebody gets around to it everybody will be using OpenType
anyway.  Practically speaking, the Wadalab fonts are quite poor, but
they cost about 10 man-years of grad student labor if I recall the
story correctly.  They're pretty good as government work goes, though.
Look at the Hershey fonts (if you can stand it...).

We're just going to need much better tools for font-building before we
can afford good free fonts.


-- 
University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
_________________  _________________  _________________  _________________
What are those straight lines for?  "XEmacs rules."