[XeTeX] Latex philosophy and tips & tricks

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

Hi all,

just a bit of philosophy, and a request for tips &
tricks.

I'm an intermediate level user of latex. I've written
several reports and theses with it. When it comes to
latex, my philosophy is that if I have an issue I need
to deal with, someone else will have dealt with it
earlier, and a style file is probably available. This
philosophy works remarkably well. I have never needed
to program any style file or class file. In that
respect, my experience with latex is excellent,
especially TeXLive which (in my opinion) is a definite
improvement over teTeX for the intermediate user
because it includes so many packages.

OK, that being said, I am on this quest with xe(la)tex
to see how good it is for Japanese. Again, I'm an
intermediate user, and this is much more out of
curiosity and an opportunity to learn, than out of
necessity.

I have been able to typeset vertical Japanese texts
using xelatex, and the fontspec package. The trick to
do is to 'rotate' the glyphs and then put those
rotated glyphs into a \rotatebox to get vertical
typesetting. This works remarkably well, especially
for short pieces of text.

I am trying to typeset a large portion of text
vertically (say almost 1 page or more than one page).
I do as follows:

- put the text into a simple \rotatebox. Result: all
text is on one line, there are no line breaks. This is
clearly not what I intended.

- I put the text in a minipage 

\rotatebox{-90}{
  \begin{minipage}{\textheight} 
    blabla 
  \end{minipage}
}

Now the line breaking (thanks to the zhspacing
package) is OK, but I cannot use any sectioning
commands etc. Furthermore, if the text occupies more
than 1 page, it will result in a simple 'overfull box'
instead of putting the text over two pages.

Thus, using my philosophy about latex, I am sure that
someone must have dealt with this. Am I right, and if
yes, who could provide pointers for the necessary
packages? Or would there be a simple solution to put a
bunch of text inside some rotatebox, with line
breaking, with sectioning available and such?

Another solution I could think of is using the
geometry package to define the pages in landscape
format, put all the text on it with rotated glyphs,
and then turn all pages 90 degrees clockwise when
producing the final PDF. While this would work for
text, I foresee problems with equations and figures
and so forth. It can be debated whether or not one
would have equations in a vertically set text (I'm not
100% sure as to what is commonly done in Japan in this
respect), but there could definitely be floats.

I am open for all tips & tricks you can think of!

Thanks,
Wilfred van Rooijen


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