[XeTeX] Current state of CJK support

[Jjgod Jiang]

Hi,

I am in a hurry so I will answer your questions briefly, of you have
further questions, we can discuss them of the list. Because some of
the packages I described below do not have English documentation, I am
not quite familiar with their internal implementations either, if you
are interested, I can refer you to the original author for answers.

On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 11:45 PM, Gerrit <z0idberg at gmx.de> wrote:
> I wonder what the current state of the CJK support in Xetex is? I read some
> manuals, but they were all more or less like about how I can insert a small
> text (maybe some words) of CJK text into a primarily western text, but not
> how to write a text completely in CJK. So I just thought a little bit which
> features are necessary for CJK text and wonder to which degree they are
> supported?
>
> 1. vertical text
> I saw the solution with rotating the boxes, but that seems to be a little
> bit of a dirty hack to me. Does this really work over multiple pages and
> with correct center line positioning?

As I understand this method works by modifying the shipout routine of
LaTeX, and to my knowledge it does work over multiple pages.

Yin Dian provided extended examples of vertical Chinese typesetting in
his gezhu package [1], you may want to check it out.

> 2. ruby
> If supported, is it to a full degree, or only basic? Do the ruby characters
> fit neatly in the line spacing or does the line get shifted a little bit?
> And is Bopomofo supported? Also, does it work for vertical text?

That's the point of gezhu package.

> 3. emphasis (with the 、markings next to the characters)

CJKfntef package supports what you want. It is integrated with CJK
package now, but you have to fetch the git repository of CJK [2].

Just google "CJKfntef" then you will get some examples using it.

> 4. nice looking footnotes (for example, a （一） as a ruby)

I cannot recall whether someone did that before at the moment, but I
don't think that will be very difficult to support with \CJKnumber
macro already defined. After all, in ctex package [3], we use Chinese
numbering for all chapters by default.

> 5. automatic switching between different fonts
> Ok, this is not really restricted to CJK, but wouldn’t it be in general
> possible to use the Unicode names for the different Blocks as some kind of
> help for that? For example
> \setmainfont{Linux Libertine}
> \setmainfont[CJK Unified Ideographs]{PMingLiu}
> \setmainfont[CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B]{PMingLiu-ExtB}
> If so, you could use a Latin font for Latin text, a Chinese font for Chinese
> etc.

zhspacing [4] by Yin Dian supports that quite well, and it has
extensive documentation in English. If you need more full featured
solution, you can check xeCJK [5], which unfortunately only have
Chinese documentation, but the examples should not be very hard to
follow.

> 8. Translations of „chapter“ etc.

Check ctex package [3] for example.

- Jiang

[1] http://code.google.com/p/gezhu/
[2] http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=cjk.git;a=summary
[3] http://code.google.com/p/ctex-kit/source/browse/trunk/ctex/
[4] http://code.google.com/p/zhspacing/
[5] http://code.google.com/p/ctex-kit/source/browse/trunk/xecjk/