[XeTeX] Basic questions about CJK (Unicode) and xelatex
Jonathan Kew
jonathan_kew at sil.org
Wed Feb 23 17:36:51 CET 2005
On 23 Feb 2005, at 3:32 pm, Roger Hart wrote:
> However, the problem comes when I have a paragraph (of more than one
> line) of Chinese. Then I get strange error messages, and the text does
> not wrap properly but extends off the page. If it is long enough, it
> eventually does wrap to make a second line.
Aha.... OK, I understand about that. I thought your problem was getting
Unicode CJK characters to render. This is a different issue.
The problem is that in a long run of Chinese text, there will typically
not be any spaces. And spaces (or hyphens, or anything else that
produces a TeX "discretionary" or suitable "glue" or "penalty") are
needed for line-breaking to be possible. So you're right, simply giving
XeTeX a paragraph of Chinese is likely to give massive problems of
overfull lines.
I'd guess that traditional (La)TeX CJK packages, which must be doing a
lot of interpretation of the character coding in TeX macros, probably
insert penalties between the characters so as to permit line breaks.
One thing on my "to-do" list for XeTeX is to add an option to
automatically allow line-breaking within runs of CJK characters,
similarly to automatic hyphenation of English (but naturally, not
inserting hyphens!) If/when I get this done, it'll be easy to deal with
text like this.
Meanwhile, a possible approach would be to make the CJK ideographs into
"active" characters that insert skip and/or penalty items around
themselves, to permit line-breaking. This isn't really a good long-term
solution, but it may be useful for the time being. See the attached
extended version of the CJK example.
HTH,
Jonathan
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