[XeTeX] CJK goodies in XeLaTeX

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

Hello all,

I am a new addition to the XeTeX list.

A couple of weeks ago a discussion started on the
Dutch latex user group about setting Japanese with
latex. Since I consider learning and reading Japanese
a hobby, the discussion was interesting for me.

In 2002 I had the pleasure of working in Japan for a
while. I had to write a paper for a conference, in
Latex with Japanese. At that time I used ptex, the
'patched' latex that is capable of reading EUC-JP
input. This was teTeX 2.2 time, and I installed
everything from scratch on Turbolinux. I remember that
it did work but especially the font trickery took some
time to get to work. Nowadays, I mainly use OpenOffice
to write Japanese (I have to write essays for my
class).

But being a latex afficionado I decided it was time to
research once and for all the possibilities of
non-latin typesetting in Japanese. After some
wikipedia'ing en several google sessions, I understand
the basics of character encodings etc.

So I researched the latex options and came across the
usual suspects:

- CJK packages. Seems to work well, full support for
ruby and associated tricks, many languages per
document, but issues remain with character coding,
preprocessors, and the need to explicitly switch
between languages and fonts

- latex + UCS. Using the correct combination of
inputenc and fontenc seems to work, but no line breaks
in CJK for instance, and very minimal documentation.
Also availability of fonts is an issue. CJK limited to
one character set per document.

- Omega/lambda + j-omega + dvipdfmx. Some non-trivial
patches are needed to work correctly, but once it
works unicode input is straightforward. Again, some
issues with fonts remain, and there is no special
support for CJK typesetting. But: no longer developed

- Hans Hagen pointed me to XeTeX, and after some
browsing in my texlive I am now able to use it. I have
installed a bunch of Japanese ttf-files in my home dir
and it works pretty well. It is definitely the best
solution to typeset unicode input in a straightforward
manner to a pdf.

So the question is: are there any CJK goodies for
XeTeX yet, like \ruby or so? Also, it seems to me that
support for vertical typesetting is necessary. I don't
think the 'trick' of rotating the characters and then
rotating a box on the page will always give a good
result (「 and 」could pose problems).
What about punctuation symbols in the margin? And how
about kerning? Is that handled by the font itself?

I'd be happy to help if I can contribute anything.

Regards,
Wilfred van Rooijen


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