[XeTeX] XeLaTeX, xeCJK, Japanese: some general questions

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

Hi all,

So far, I have found that xeCJK allows one to mix latin and CJK, and xeCJK will make sure that the corresponding fonts are automatically selected, i.e. \setmainfont{font_for_latin} and \setCJKmainfont{font_for_CJK}. Helpful, I do not need to \XeTeXinterchartoks anymore. Also line breaking is taken care of. I have not checked the details, for instance, things like "protruding interpuncion" ("burasage" in Japanese"). To be honest, most Japanese text books I read (mostly of a mathematical nature) do not seem to care too much about typesetting: latin and kanji interpunction characters are mixed at liberty (e.g. "." and "。", "," and "、", and "[]" and "「」"), line breaking is abismal at times, equations are sometimes broken across page boundaries, etc. I remember that it used to be somewhat complicated to set texts vertically, I guess I should check that out (but in reality I have never seen a text book that is set vertically because the equations
 become very confusing).

About the gloss-japanese and gloss-nihongo.... that does ring a bell. But I also remember that in the end it did not work properly. I remember I downloaded those files from some obscure website and they were adaptations of adaptations. For whatever reason there is, we (myself and Francois) decided that they were no good for an official release. Anyway - I can take a look again, possibly in september when we are on summer break and there are no classes. OK, I will put this on my to-do list.


An English translation of the xeCJK manual would be very much appreciated (for me, Japanese is also acceptable....). I don't know why there are apparently so few Japanese users of xetex and xelatex. I guess most people use MS Word, or Ichitaro. In fact, the few people I know who use tex at all use platex + dvips + all kinds of horrible things to make their files. I guess one problem is that the "free" Japanese fonts are often very sparse, they do not have boldface, italic, etc. Boldface is needed - it is used in almost all Japanese text books, for sections headers etc. 


OK, thanks for the info,
Wilfred



________________________________
 From: Jiang Jiang <gzjjgod at gmail.com>
To: Wilfred van Rooijen <wvanrooijen at yahoo.com>; Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms <xetex at tug.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, June 5, 2013 12:34 AM
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] XeLaTeX, xeCJK, Japanese: some general questions
 

On Mon, Jun 3, 2013 at 3:26 AM, Wilfred van Rooijen
<wvanrooijen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Xelatex, fontspec, xeCJK, zhspacing..... what is the best way to go? Which
> of these packages can be considered "mature"? Also, polyglossia does not
> handle Japanese (yet), what is the status there? Or should we forget about
> XeLaTeX and go for luaLaTeX? Some general comments would be warmly
> appreciated.

For typesetting Chinese documents with XeLaTeX, I'd recommend using xeCJK.
Also, using xeCJK doesn't prevent you from accessing fontspec directly, you
can still use it to set up fonts for other languages.

(You can use the ctex document class as well, which is a higher level wrapper
of both xeCJK and other Chinese typesetting options.)

- Jiang
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