[XeTeX] XeTex and Japanese kunten and warichū

[Clemente Beghi]

Hello everyone,

Lately I have been trying to make some pdf files with old Japanese
text in them, using XeTex (inside TexLive) and Lyx, both on Windows/
and Ubuntu, but it has been quite difficult and not a hundred percent
successful.
The problem is that I need vertical text (tategaki 縦書き), reading marks
(kunten 訓点, a sort of ruby that appears on both sides of the vertical
line of text, not just the right one) and interlinear notes (warichū
割注, in the space of a vertical line or little more there are two lines
of text).
As for the vertical text, Michiel Kamermans kindly provided me with
the custom made vertical.sty and iroha.sty, allowing me to have
vertical text with right side ruby, but still I cannot manage to do
all the things I need.
In Japan people usually use pTex (which will be included in TexLive
2010) instead of XeTex and they made many nice .sty files to handle
the sort of text mentioned before. The problem is that pTex is not
really unicode aware and not so easy to use with all fonts as XeTex. I
tried using kunten2e.sty, sfkanbun.sty, kanbun.sty and kanruby.sty
directly on XeTex, but, as expected, they do not work as they are.
Here are some links to Japanese pages dealing with
http://www.geocities.co.jp/HeartLand-Icho/9917/tex.htm
http://www.orcaland.gr.jp/~utsunomiya/TeX.htm
http://igproj.com/fusion/wiki/LaTeX/index.php?Tips%2F%E6%BC%A2%E6%96%87%20for%20ptexlive2008

I am now trying to use pTex with Lyx, but ideally, it would be really
nice if more complicated Japanese styles could be handled directly by
XeTex.
I was wondering if anyone ever had my same problems and if anyone knew
how to solve them.
All the best