Re: Documentation (was Re: [OS X TeX] Kanbun (漢文) and French...)

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

On samedi 03 janv. 09, at 17:16, Jean-Claude DE SOZA wrote:

> Re-bonjour Jean-Christophe,
>
>> Now I use, in the middle of the French "Avertissement", a  
>> Vietnamese word (hán vǎn) that misses the "ǎ" when I typeset the  
>> text with the above settings. Depending on the preambles I use  
>> (either mine or a modified version of yours) I either get "v n" or  
>> "vn".
>>
>> I suppose I am starting to see the beginning of multilingual TeX  
>> here...
>>
>> Jean-Christophe Helary
>
> If I have correctly read all the messages of this thread, you have  
> now the MacTeX package installed.
> Open Terminal and type: texdoc vntex and you'll see something like  
> this:
>
> vntex-3.1.7

Jean-Claude,

Thank you very much for all the information.

My problem here is: I am using utf-8 and supposedly XeteX is accessing  
the fonts on my system.

For me, this character (ǎ) is just an arbitrary character and I happen  
to know that it is a Vietnamese word because I understand the  
surrounding text. Otherwise, it would be an arbitrary character in an  
arbitrary string.

I just tried \setmainfont{Lucida Grande} and it happens that the  
character got displayed correctly, but of course, not the Japanese  
characters I had put there for testing purposes... I have 2 nice white  
squares instead. Indeed, when I set the font to "Hiragino Kaku Gothic  
Pro" (after checking the Character Palette to see if all the  
characters I needed were there) I was able to display the French, the  
Vietnamese and the Japanese without (for now, knock on wood...) any  
visible issue.

What that means, to my super beginner eyes, is that basically, merely  
specifying a font would be enough for most of the typesetting I need.  
The complex part (column layout with mixed French and kanbun) can only  
be typeset by the use of special packages that specifically handle the  
kanbun part.

Am I correct ?





Jean-Christophe Helary