[XeTeX] can you advise me about Chinese fonts and xelatex?

Paul Johnson pauljohn32 at gmail.com
Fri Jan 23 06:48:55 CET 2009


On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 3:30 PM, Peter Dyballa <Peter_Dyballa at web.de> wrote:
>
> Am 21.01.2009 um 04:05 schrieb Paul Johnson:
>
> http://pj.freefaculty.org/latex/xetex-3.pdf
>
> Using the xltxtra package you can use \XeTeX and \XeLaTeX commands (and
> also \TeX and \LaTeX variants). I think they all need a final {} or \␣ ...
>
> Fonts are Unicode encoded (or use some other font encoding, from Adobe,
> Big5, or a GB encoding, mostly meant for on-screen or printer use, which are
> not that easily usable in XeTeX) while a text can be saved in an UTF-8 (or
> -7 or -16 or -32) text encoding, which a font does not have.
> X11 can easily use Unicode encoded fonts, you just need to install them, and
> either the X server or the fontconfig clients or both can use this font in a
> handful of different encodings for screen use, i.e., inside your text
> editor. XeTeX uses on Linux systems libfontconfig to access font names and
> font files. The commands fc-cache, fc-list, fc-match are related to this. A
> file (or set of) fonts.conf (files) configures this latter scheme,
> system-wide or user-specific.
>
> Interesting CJK fonts are also Sun-ExtA and Sun-ExtB. The latter uses
> Unicode planes beyond the
> BMP. http://www.alanwood.net/downloads/index.html, http://okuc.net/software/UniFonts.exe.
> http://www.unifont.org/fontguide/ points
> to http://www.study-area.org/apt/firefly-font/ (AR PL New Sung).
> --
> Greetings
>   Pete
> Let's face it; we don't want a free market economy either.
> – James Farley, president, Coca-Cola Export Corp., 1959
>

If you mean to say Firefly looks better than Cyberbit, you might be
right.  I inserted Firefly in my xetex-3.pdf file.  You can look in
the Demo section and compare the 2 side by side. Please let me know
what you think.

As for the rest of your note, I can't understand what you mean.  Do
you mean to say you think Sun-ExtA is more attractive than Firefly?
If so I will download and test it.

Today, one of my former students who is in Taiwan wrote and said that
he found the output from CJK-Latex with the cwkc fonts to be adequate
in PDF. I found the cwkc font in the cwTeX collection of fonts for
latex.  Those are postscript type 1 fonts and I'm comparing them.
However, it appears to me that xelatex cannot use those fonts because
they are type 1.  I'm looking to see if I can find a true/open type
version of cwkc to use that with xelatex.

pj


-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas


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