tlug: Q. about Wadalab Fonts & encoding

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

>>>>> "Matt" == Matt Gushee <matt@example.com> writes:

    Matt> 1) Am I correct in thinking that Wadalab Mincho contains the
    Matt> full JIS-X0208 character set, sequenced in the standard
    Matt> Kuten order? So that if I want to know which character is in
    Matt> which position, I can just look it up in a kuten table such
    Matt> as the ones in Lunde's _Understanding Japanese Information
    Matt> Processing_? By the way, is it the JIS-X0208-1983 or 1990
    Matt> character set (I know the difference is very small)?

Yes, yes, and look it up in the header portion of the files; I believe 
that it must be specified.  They're fairly recent so they are probably 
JIS X 0208-1990.  They are in fact indexed by JIS codes, not kuten.
It is very easy (but tedious) to write Postscript wrappers to provide
Shit-JIS and EUC encoded fonts.  Wadalab provides some; Peter Deutsch
(Ghostscript's author) said (years ago, maybe they're better now) that 
they are both terrible Postscript and incorrect in some cases.

    Matt> 2) I generated a set of VPL files, and I notice that the
    Matt> CODINGSCHEME is defined as DMENCODING + TEX-TEXT. Can
    Matt> anybody tell me what DMENCODING means and, more importantly,
    Matt> whether dvips and ghostscript actually need to know about
    Matt> it?

Ghostscript does not.  dvips already does, I believe.  I don't know
what those are precisely, but I think they are specified by the TeX
virtual font interface.

It's been years since I played with that; but at the time one major
gotcha was that VFlib interfered with TeX's own definition of virtual
fonts.  I believe it still does.  Watch out for VFlib-enabled gs and
TeXs.  There was a workaround, but that was for NTT jtex; I dunno
about ASCII ptex.

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