Re: [tlug] Printing Japanese

[Matt Gushee <mgushee@example.com>]

Patrick wrote:

> I just wanted to know what encoding you use. I had a quick look at
> http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
> 
> and i see you are a big unicode fan. Can use I use unicode with ptex or
> should i convert it to jis or euc?

Steve can probably tell you more than you want to know on this topic, 
but since I happened to be here, the short answer is, no, you can't use 
Unicode with pTeX. TeX was invented long before Unicode, and of course 
it's a huge package so it would be a mammoth undertaking to 
internationalize it after the fact. There is a project called Omega 
which is a Unicode-based reimplementation of TeX, but it doesn't really 
do CJKV yet--its development is going quite slowly (or not at all?) and 
the developers seem to be mainly interested in Arabic.

So you have to convert. I think if it were me, and I had a lot of 
Unicode documents to process, I would write a preprocessing script that 
would convert the document to a Japanese encoding, then invoke pTeX on 
the output. Should be easy in (at least) Python or Perl.

Hope this helps.

--
Matt Gushee
Englewood, CO, USA