Re: tlug: Japanese emails and jlatex under RedHat 6.1

[Matt Gushee <mgushee@example.com>]

Simon Cozens writes:
 > 
 > If you just want to use (La)TeX and Japanese, instead use
 > Werner Lemberg's wonderful CJK package, available from a 

Sorry, didn't mean to ignore you. I just hadn't gotten this when I
wrote my other message.

Jens-Ulrik Petersen writes:

 > It works pretty well.  Though if you are planning to do a lot of
 > Japanese LaTeX I should warn that I had trouble getting xdvi to
 > display Japanese, though ghostview is ok.

This applies only to ASCII JTeX/pTeX. Both NTT-JTeX and CJK produce
output that is readable with any recent xdvi.

Stephen J. Turnbull writes:

 > I've found building TeX, especially Japanese TeXs, to be a massive
 > pita with no gyro inside.  I guess you should be OK building from the
 > source RPMs, but I wouldn't even bet on that.

Dunno why. I've built teTeX 0.9 twice and 1.0 once. Yes it was a huge
download and took a fair amount of time, but was a fairly trouble-free 
build, and I got some cool stuff that isn't on the RedHat CDs ... have 
to admit I'm a TeX feature junkie, though.

 > I'll second Simon's recommendation of using CJK-TeX, although it's an
 > ugly hack. ;-)

Yeah, I guess it is. Well, on the horizon is Omega, which is
Unicode-based and will solve all the world's typesetting problems
(yeah, right ;-) .  The developers seem serious about it, though they
haven't put out much documentation, so I dunno whether they are (a)
hard at work dealing with the genuinely enormous problems of
international text-handling, (b) busy with other projects, or (c) just
being lazy professors.

But they do give some beautiful test cases of Arabic type-setting --
and evidently Arabic is a *bear-and-a-half*, because glyphs change
according to their position in a word/sentence and there are a number
of compound glyphs like the one for 'Allah'. Whereas the really tough
issues with Chinese and Japanese (if we ignore furigana) -- number of
characters, incompatible encoding standards, questions about when
something is a distinct character and when it's just a variant glyph
-- are peripheral to the task of laying out symbols on a page. So if
Omega does Unicode and can handle Arabic, it ought to be plenty
powerful enuf to typeset CJK. As I understand it the main thing is to
write character translation specs. I started on that myself a few
months ago but haven't had much time to continue the effort.


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