[XeTeX] CJK goodies in XeLaTeX

[Arthur Reutenauer]

	Hello,

  Yes, XeTeX, is certainly the best variant of TeX for multilingual
typesetting, but it's probably not the most appropriate one if you focus
on Japanese typography: pTeX still offers much more.  I don't know how
actively it's being developed  and distributed, though.

  About some of your questions:

>                              Also, it seems to me that
> support for vertical typesetting is necessary. I don't
> think the 'trick' of rotating the characters and then
> rotating a box on the page will always give a good
> result (「 and 」could pose problems).

  XeTeX doesn't offer much for vertical typesetting, but the particular
issue with rotated punctuation marks is more of a font problem: the
character is the same, whether you set the text horizontally or
vertically, but it has to be given a different treatment in each
environment, and that means selecting another glyph in the font.  If you
have OpenType Japanese fonts, look for the 'vert' and 'vrt2' features.
XeTeX should handle them without any problem.

> What about punctuation symbols in the margin?

  I don't know how advanced XeTeX's support is in that respect.

>                                               And how
> about kerning? Is that handled by the font itself?

  Kerning is only a property of the font anyway -- the typesetting
engine needs of course to support it, but XeTeX knows how to handle any
type of kerning mechanism used nowadays.

  There is a XeTeX package for Chinese called zhspacing
(http://code.google.com/p/zhspacing/) which should implement more or
less the kinsoku rules; I never looked into it, but the author sometimes
lingers on the list ;-)

	Arthur