[tex-eplain] TeX--XeT

[Laurence.Finston at gmx.net]

If you're using TeX--XeT and the plain format, to use any characters you want, all you have to do is load the fonts you want:

\font\chineseten=chinesefontone10
\font\japanesetwelve=japanese12
\font\koreanseven=korean7

etc.

The encoding is whatever position each character is in in the font.  To find this out easily, use testfont:

tex testfont

Then, at the prompt, enter the font you want to test.

chinesefontone10

Then, at the prompt, enter \table and then \end.

This will create a DVI file with a table of the characters, like the one attached for cmr10 (converted to PDF).
The positions are labelled in octal and hexadecimal, so if you have 8 or 16 fingers, you're in luck.

To typeset a character, you just type \char\char65 or \char'101 or \char"41 to get the letter "A", for example.

It would be sensible to define macros and/or active characters to get the characters you want.

\catcode`\H=13
\defH{\char65}

Then, when you type H, you get the letter A.  It's fine for a couple of letters, but not really a good solution for the general problem or for the case where you need a lot of letters.  And a font can only hold 256 characters, so you'd need a lot of them;  maybe too much for TeX's capacity.

There is another solution using the facilities designed for math fonts, but I don't recall the details and I don't think it's worth it.  I personally would look for something other than TeX that's designed for this purpose.

I actually think turning letters and pages on their sides would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do for a couple of displays, though not as a general solution.  It really isn't hard to modify fonts in simple ways.

> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 12. Oktober 2023 um 07:16 Uhr
> Von: terry.s at Safe-mail.net
> An: tex-eplain at tug.org
> Betreff: [tex-eplain] TeX--XeT
>
> Laurence, thanks for reminding me. I've heard of that once or twice and should check it out. (The Asian character-maps and hyphenation patterns would still matter, except for short phrases.)
>
> Terry S.
>
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