[tex-eplain] LaTeX vs just TeX (or TeX with eplain) vs everything else

[Karl Berry]

(Oops, I forgot to send this yesterday. FWIW ...)

1) Regarding Japanese, https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Japanese
looks like a decent overview (in English) of what's available.

And a vertical example is here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/295414
There are "related" questions with more. I doubt you want to reinvent
that world.


2) Regarding using your system fonts, both xetex and luatex can use them
directly, without any extra "installation" as is required for (pdf)tex.

In LaTeX it would be, for example with Liberation:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont[Ligatures=TeX]{Liberation Serif}
\begin{document} This is Liberation Serif. \end{document}

Use the system font name as known to fontconfig (Linux) or whatever
(everything else) as the argument.

It will also change italic, bold, etc.

In plain TeX, you have to do it all yourself, of course:
\font\1="Liberation Serif" % quotes are required
{\1 This is Liberation Serif.}

See the xetex-reference.pdf manual for more details.  I believe the same
font-loading syntax works for luatex and xetex, at least to a first
approximation, though I haven't tried it recently.

Best,
Karl