[XeTeX] which TeX-based software
Wilfred van Rooijen
wvanrooijen at yahoo.com
Sun Apr 29 08:27:16 CEST 2018
What I was trying to explain was the following: even if the software supports UTF-8 / unicode, then that does not necessarily mean that it supports ("out of the box") all your typographical wishes and demands.
The OP was referring to several complicated typesetting tasks. My advice is: do not stare yourself blind on support for unicode alone. If you need several complicated typesetting tasks, check out the various classes, packages and tex-engine as a whole. Especially if you are using a more or less traditional alphabet and you do not need to use Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Ethiopian, Cambodian, Thai and Hindi in one document, you can just as well use the traditional versions of latex/
As far as up(La)TeX is concerned: yes, there is upLaTeX, which is the best Japanese language version of LaTeX as far as I am concerned, and which my students often use. I prefer LuaLaTeX because upLaTeX does not support PDF inclusion.
Wilfred
On Sunday, April 29, 2018 1:12 AM, Arthur Reutenauer <arthur.reutenauer at normalesup.org> wrote:
> Second, about unicode, my experiences are mixed. I use Japanese as my main language of communication. I found that "plain XeLaTeX" is not really adequate for Japanese as it lacks many common features; LuaLaTeX performs better, but still not as good as the pre-UTF-8 special "Japanese LaTeX" called "platex". In other words, even if XeLaTeX can typeset all unicode characters, you still need proper fonts, and special typesetting (such as indents, hyphenation rules, etc) may not be perfect.
In yet other words, the features you miss are about Japanese
typesetting, not Unicode. This is an important distinction since the
original poster doesn’t need to typeset Japanese.
As a an aside, if you’re talking about pTeX you should really mention
its UTF-8 extension, upTeX.
> If you are looking for something which based on TeX but closer to DTP software, check out ConTeXt. ConTeXt has been used for many complex, professional typesetting jobs, and the developers are very active in trying to find new solutions if needed. IIRC the current version of ConTeXt supports at least LuaLaTeX which provides support for UTF-8
The version that’s currently actively developed, Mark IV (mkiv) is
focused on LuaTeX, while the earlier version, Mark II, is more or less
frozen and supports pdfTeX and XeTeX.
Best,
Arthur
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