[XeTeX] About Chinese in XeTeX

[Jonathan Kew]

On 24 Jun 2009, at 11:38, YANG weiwei wrote:

> All:
>
> Does anybody has used xetex to typeset Chinese?

Yes. There's an old sample file at <http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/render_download.php?site_id=nrsi&format=file&media_id=xetex_chinese_sample&filename=xetex_chinese_sample.zip 
 > that you might find helpful. The zip file contains both source and  
PDF, so you can see the input and the result.

(Note that this was created on a Mac, so if you're on a different  
platform you'd need to change the font names to something you have  
available in order to re-typeset it.)

> How do you break the line ?

The simplest starting point is to include

   \XeTeXlinebreaklocale "zh"
   \XeTeXinterchartokenstate = 1

at the beginning of your document.

> And is there anything that we should pay attention to when we deal  
> with the Chinese?


For a start, make sure your text is Unicode (although it's possible to  
use other encodings such as Big5, etc., life will be MUCH simpler if  
you use Unicode throughout). And be sure to select fonts that include  
the characters you need; xetex will not magically enable Computer  
Modern to print Chinese characters!

For more advanced handling of character spacing and other issues, you  
could look at the zhspacing package (see http://code.google.com/p/zhspacing/) 
  and/or xeCJK (on CTAN, I believe, or ask Google for more details).  
Oh, I just found http://code.google.com/p/ctex-kit/ which also seems  
to be a source for these kinds of packages.

I expect some of the Chinese users here will give you further guidance  
if needed.

JK