[XeTeX] XeTex and Japanese kunten and warichū

[Wilfred van Rooijen]

Hi all,

It seems that some standardization is needed for CJK in xelatex. We have had discussion going on and off about ruby, furigana, spacing around letters etc. From my limited knowledge, please consider this:

- A polyglossia package (polyglossia = babel for xelatex) is in the making (I am making it). But the syntax of polyglossia changed recently, and Francois Charette and I have identified some issues with Japanese that can at this moment not be handled with polyglossia. In the meantime, there are two gloss files floating on the net (gloss-japanese.ldf and gloss-nihongo.ldf) which are adaptations of the babel gloss files, and Your Mileage May Very when you use them. We have tried to contact the original author but no reply. The polyglossia style files will also include things like setting the date into the Japanese calendar (i.e. 2010 becomes Heisei 22).

- Automatic switching between CJK and non-CJK fonts is already possible. Mike Kamermans once posted the solution to this problem. I am considering putting it into the polyglossia gloss file, but I am not sure whether that is the right place for such commands

- Line breaking in CJK can be manipulated with \XeTeXlinebreaklocale, and default settings are OK for Japanese. Spacing between characters is something that I don't know enough about. The zhspacing package is available on the net but I don't know about the status.

- Indeed, in Japan pTeX is the weapon of choice, so we really need to find some of the programmers who made the stylefiles for pTeX to comment on the developments for xelatex.

- Vertical typesetting with xelatex is doable by using a rotatebox and rotating the glyphs, but this is not nearly industrial strength at the moment, so we need to find out how this issue is dealt with in pTeX.

- Ruby, furigana etc should be doable as long as somebody can draw up a list of specifications. I am sure that there is a JIS standard but with my limited command of the Japanese language that is impossible to read.

So, a call to the Japanese readers of this list: HELP US OUT! And we'll make xelatex better than pTeX :-))

Cheers,
Wilfred


--- On Sun, 5/9/10, Tak Yato (ZR) <zrbabbler at yahoo.co.jp> wrote:

> From: Tak Yato (ZR) <zrbabbler at yahoo.co.jp>
> Subject: [XeTeX] XeTex and Japanese kunten and warich&#363;
> To: xetex at tug.org
> Date: Sunday, 5 September, 2010, 12:14 PM
> >- Although the whole kunten
> processing indeed involves some (wierd
> >kind of) ruby positioning (i.e. okurigana), kunten
> itself (re-ten,
> >ichi-ni-ten, etc.) is not in “left-ruby” position,
> but resides
> >at the left-bottom of a kanji to be annotated, that is,
> kunten
> >goes between kanji.
> The author of sfkanbun package, Shinsaku Fujita, shows some
> samples
> of kunten typesetting on his web site.
> http://homepage3.nifty.com/xymtex/fujitas/kanbun/kanbunex.html
> You can view more samples by clicking the links to JPG
> images.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Tak Yato (Takayuki YATO)
> 
> 
> 
> 
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