[tex-eplain] TeX--XeT

[terry.s at Safe-mail.net]

> Of course, 256 characters isn't enough for Asian fonts.
...
> If you have the fonts, you can typeset in any RTL language.  It works for Hebrew and Arabic.
>

That seems confusing, until thinking that LaTeX and some packages work around this. But AFAIK, they only provide 2-bit mappings.

Then I think the issue is the Asian fonts distributed with TeX Live are created for engines like pTeX and upTeX (with the caveat that pTeX uses an older "Shift-JIS" encoding). Those engines wouldn't use the old mapping system.

Again, I tried to install some using *fontinst* (spelling?) et. al a while back, but the instructions to create mappings from PostScript files were complex and didn't work. I don't have the expertise for that, and the instructions predated LaTeX's UTF-8 support. (Forget about the 3-bit issue specifically for LaTeX, I couldn't even install them + create mappings.) I have very nice PS fonts on my computer.

I did not have Internet for several years and couldn't even install TL from the web. (It would take a full day, and I don't mean business hours.) I joined TUG and was exclusively using the DVD and some VERY LIMITED time on public WiFi. I would look up as much info as I could and save it to USB for reading later. (A horrible way to learn something!)

Now I am aware there are new tools which should be appropriate to UTF-8, and should have new, appropriate instructions. I'm putting that off for the moment, though.

I could not imagine typing charcodes for each character. With MS-IME, you just type in roman characters phoenetically (Japanese has no spaces):
arigatougozaimasu!
And you get:
ありがとうございます！

And that works in virtually all applications. (Source must be saved as UTF-8 or any Unicode encoding, which TeXmaker is perfectly capable of doing.) Any TeX engine ... even one with Unicode support ... will have an error when you try to compile if it doesn't support the language, i.e. have character mappings for CJK characters and perhaps specifically the "hyphenation patterns" (as was the case with OpTeX). It just doesn't understand the input.