Re: [tlug] proposal for talk on LaTeX

[Simon Cozens <simon@example.com>]

Gernot Hassenpflug wrote:
> My aim has been and continues to be the practical use of LaTeX for
> typesetting documents in Japanese and English   (in the same
> document), and using both horizontal and vertical typesetting.

I've been a TeX and LaTeX user for a good ten years now, and struggled
for many years to get decent CJK support, even with the CJK.sty package.
I spent a few years playing with Lambda and Omega and getting a bit
further - well enough to complete my undergraduate dissertation which
mixed English and Japanese type. The big hang-up was the fonts.

Then in the past couple of years, when I've needed to add Hebrew and
Greek into the mix as well, I discovered XeTeX, which makes everything
so much better. XeTeX uses the system's own fonts and font metrics
instead of TeX's own tortuous and twisted understand of fonts.

See http://blog.simon-cozens.org/tag/view/tex for some of the things
I've been doing with it. If you're doing Japanese typesetting with TeX,
XeTeX is very much worth checking out.

-- 
"He was a modest, good-humored boy.  It was Oxford that made him
insufferable."