[XeTeX] Latex philosophy and tips & trick

[Arthur Reutenauer]

> Hypothetically (because I'm not facing this problem now, but maybe some 
> day), what would you do if you wanted to mix English and Japanese (or 
> Mongolian, which can also be written vertically, I believe) on the same 
> page?

  The Latin letters have to be rotated by 90 degrees in order for the
English text to be set along a vertical line.  Just have a look at the
numerous PDF files that have been posted to the list to help Wilfred get
his examples working.

  Mongolian written in Mongolian-Uyghur is somewhat different, as one
nowadays tends more and more to typeset the whole script horizontally
from left to right, despite the historical origins of the script, and
the fact that the whole line now seems to "point downward", as the
script's most prominent graphical features are below the main line.
This clears a number of issues, but of course things can also be done
the same way as for vertical Japanese text, setting Mongolian in its
native top-to-bottom direction, and rotating Western scripts.

  I have a Mongolian-Chinese dictionary which uses this: the entries are
in Mongolian, followed by their phonetic transcription in Latin letters
(in a modified IPA scheme), then by the Chinese translation set
vertically.  The whole tends to be quite confusing at first sight,
especially as the Chinese columns have to run from left to right,
contrary to the usual vertical typesetting of ideographic scripts.

  Bilingual Chinese-Mongolian roadsigns in Inner Mongolia use a
different device by simply breaking the Mongolian text in very short
columns, usually placed beneath the corresponding Chinese text (a couple
of characters each time). This tends to make them quite huge (as they
need to span both horizontally and vertically), and, in my opinion,
rather ugly.

	Arthur