[XeTeX] CJK goodies in XeLaTeX

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

Hello,

>   Yes, XeTeX, is certainly the best variant of TeX
> for multilingual
> typesetting, but it's probably not the most
> appropriate one if you focus
> on Japanese typography: pTeX still offers much more.
>  I don't know how
> actively it's being developed  and distributed,
> though.

It seems that there is one guy in Japan who has
released ptetex3 and ptexlive 2007, sets of patches
for tetex3 and texlive. However, my goal is to have
something simple, usable from, say, an intermediate
level of latex experience. Patching tetex, building
from source, fiddling around with dvipdfmx and having
to tweak the fonts as in ptex is a threshold for the
incidental users who just wants to know what latex can
do nowadays.

Furthermore, ptex is bound to EUC-JP input file
encoding. This should not be a real problem, but for
instance my gentoo system will default support UTF-8
and EUC-JP is only available if you specifically ask
for it. I don't know about other linux'en, though. But
at any rate, EUC-JP moves us back into the dark ages,
to a certain extend (plus most Windows and Mac editor
will probably only support (S)JIS).

> 
>   XeTeX doesn't offer much for vertical typesetting,

Would this be an issue of lack of a package, or is it
something internal to XeTeX? I read in the doc that
'vertical works but is not stable for release' (?)

> in the font.  If you
> have OpenType Japanese fonts, look for the 'vert'
> and 'vrt2' features.
> XeTeX should handle them without any problem.

I have found a bunch of cool, free ttf Japanese
things. I'll look for some otf stuff.

Thanks,
Wilfred


> 
> > What about punctuation symbols in the margin?
> 
>   I don't know how advanced XeTeX's support is in
> that respect.
> 
> >                                               And
> how
> > about kerning? Is that handled by the font itself?
> 
>   Kerning is only a property of the font anyway --
> the typesetting
> engine needs of course to support it, but XeTeX
> knows how to handle any
> type of kerning mechanism used nowadays.
> 
>   There is a XeTeX package for Chinese called
> zhspacing
> (http://code.google.com/p/zhspacing/) which should
> implement more or
> less the kinsoku rules; I never looked into it, but
> the author sometimes
> lingers on the list ;-)
> 
> 	Arthur
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