[XeTeX] OFFLIST: Re: Japanese, Chinese, Korean support for Polyglossia

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

Hi Benct,

> 
> I guess that means you only need key(board positions) for
> those ~40 phonetic characters and a rendering engine which
> automagically replaces h+a+n with the composite syllable
> character for "han", which also means that when you
> backspace
> the entire syllable will disappear.  Having written my

I suppose it could be done that way. In Japanese it is done in a similar way: you type the "phonetic equivalent" and then press the space bar to get all possible characters which could be pronounced in the way you have just typed. So "Tokyo" is input as T+o+u+k+y+o+u (Japanese has short and long "o", the long one is written "ou" in hiragana), and then you will be presented a list of all kanji matching that pronunciation. With a bit of training the system is pretty quick.
 
> this was done so, but I also guess that the "character
> composition" rendering could have been done with glyph
> substitution rather than assigning ~22.000 Unicode code
> positions!  Was this done so purely for backwards

I don't know. If you assign all 22.000 "official" combinations, you don't need to worry about implementing all the "rules" and their exceptions when compounding sounds into composite "characters". But maybe an expert on Korean unicode can comment on this?

> > - The Japanese terms for "chapter", "section" etc are
> numerous
> > and depend on the type of document. In most Japanese
> > non-scientific material, the difference between a
> chapter and a
> > section, or any document division tends to be more
> fluid than
> > in Western works.

Now that I reread it, this is not very clear. What I meant is the following: The Japanese word for "chapter" is usually 章 (shou), but depending on the type of work a different kanji can be used to indicate the same "chapter-equivalent document division". The same (I think) applies to sections etc.

My second statement has to do with this: I have seen some books where "chapters" were really more like "parts", and "sections" were more like chapters. But then again, I don't know enough of the history of Japanese book-making to make any sensible comments on this.

Cheers,
Wilfred