[pdftex] ucs.sty & others

[Martin Jansche]

On Sun, 13 Jul 2003, Jean-Christophe Dubacq wrote:

> However, I can only have pdftex use the pk files generated by ttf2pk,
> not the ttf directly.

You can use .ttf files more or less directly with pdftex.  My own
setup (under Debian) is as follows: at the end of
/etc/texmf/pdftex/pdftex.cfg there is an entry "map +arphic.map" (for
example), where arphic.map is in the kpathsea search path and contains
entries like

bsmi01 <bsmi01.enc <bsmi00lp.ttf
bsmi02 <bsmi02.enc <bsmi00lp.ttf
:
:
:

The font bsmi00lp.ttf is a large TrueType font (Big5 encoding) that is
split up into 55 planes of 256 glyphs per plane.  A pdf file generated
by pdftex using this font can be found at

http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/chinese.pdf

If you do a pdffonts on it, you'll see that it embeds TrueType
(sub)fonts for each referenced plane.  I doubt that there is any
simple way of using the full font directly in TeX without reencoding
and splitting it into planes.

> What I need precisely: most of my text is in French/English, but some
> geographical names are in local languages (arabic, chinese, japanese,
> georgian, armenian, russian, etc.)

Chinese and Japanese are no problem: the cjk-latex package is very
nice and there are several .ttf files that you can use directly, or
you can convert them to .pfb Type 1 fonts.  For Georgian, there are
metafont source files for Mxedruli on CTAN.  Russian should be no
problem.  Don't know anything about Armenian.  Arabic might need some
fiddling.

In general, you might want to look into using Omega/Lambda.  Maybe
it's just me, but I can never find enough information on how exactly
to make it all work together in Lambda, though.  I'd appreciate any
pointers and/or clear, simple examples of a working Lambda
installation.

Thanks,

- martin