mzw_t@hpujsda.HP.COM (Matsuzawa Takashi) (10/17/90)
Archive-name: jtex/16-Oct-90
Original-posting-by: mzw_t@hpujsda.HP.COM (Matsuzawa Takashi)
Original-subject: Re: Japanese TeX
Archive-site: miki.cs.titech.ac.jp [131.112.16.39]
Reposted-by: emv@math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti)
----
There already exist two Japanese TeX's that are widely used in Japan.
They are `jTeX' ported at NTT (Nihon Telephone & Telegram) lab and
Nihongo-TeX ported by ASCII co., a Japanese private company. They are
both based on ctex 2.95 (or, pre-3.0) UNIX implementations. JTeX first
ran on TOPS-20 and ported to VAX/VMS and UNIX. They are in public and
you can obtain them free from following Internet hosts via anonymous FTP.
miki.cs.titech.ac.jp (Tokyo Institute of Technology)
utsun.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp (Tokyo University)
Their archives are named as `ASCII-jTeX' or `NTT-jTeX' there.
I believe there is no widely used public port of Japanese TeX to PC's yet.
(ASCII co. is already selling the commercial version of Nihongo-TeX on
NEC's PC-9801 computers, the major force in Japanese PC world.) So, you
are encouraged to work on your Japanese TeX!
---
JIS kanji set (JIS X 0208) for your character set is a good choice and
enough. It includes Hiraganas, Katakanas, miscellaneous punctuations, and
Kanjis --- you will not meet serious difficulties denoting the usual Japanese
language sentenses. I can not be sure from where your JIS24 data came, but
you can obtain the public kanji fonts in X11 bdf formats, from the sites
I have noted above. (You can find k14.tar.Z, etc.) --- They may be not
large enogh to meet your needs, but they are in public domain.
Note: I will use the term `kanji's to denote the non-ASCII characters that
appear in Japanese texts hereafter --- although `kanji's are just the subset
of Japanese characters, as you might know.
My only suggestion to your implementation is to use Shift-JIS kanji code
or EUC (UJIS) kanji code for your input texts. (Or, you can also use the
complicated ISO escape sequences to invoke kanji character sets from within
ASCII texts.) They are standard encodings (multiple-byte encoding schemes)
to manipulate Japanese texts in computer data. If your TeX allows these
character codes, you can enjoy printing out whatever Japanese langage text
files you have obtained from somewhere.
----
And, here is a brief description of NTT's jTeX implementation.
(Nihongo-TeX has done major enhancements to TeX font file formats that are
incompatible with ordinal TeX, and I think their approach is too drastic.
--- they are planning to implement Nihongo-TeX with vertical writing mode,
and it itself is a very interesting attempt, though...)
In fact, I am currently using jTeX (jLaTeX) on my Apollo workstations,
and a bit knowlegeble about it. I hope this will give you some hints on
your Japanese TeX implementation. The main reason that jTeX does not
`blow up' is that it treats Japanese text as a series of character codes,
not as series of graphic patterns. --- There do exists the limit of loadable
font numbers, though. (I think it might be good to look into jtex.ch,
the TeX change file which is the core of jTeX implementation. you can also
find the working implementations of jLaTeX, jBibTeX, etc.)
---
jTeX reads the input text (which is generally the mixture of ordinal ASCII
codes and Kanji codes.) It detects the kanjis in it and encode them into
the special internal codes (a pair of bytes specifies one Japanese character).
jTeX apply Japanese language specific formatting rules on them. For example,
jTeX has the concept `current kanji-font' in addition to TeX's `current font'
--- you have two `current font's in jTeX. Kanji characters have special
glues, etc.
----
jTeX' internal expression of a Japanese character is as follows.
<sub-font#><char#-within-subfont>
As you have wrote, because Japanese language has so many characters, TeX
font files' limit (256 glyphs) is not enough. jTeX uses multiple TeX font
files for one font. i.e. you need just one file for the 10pt Computer-Modern
font (cmr10.300pk, it contains necessary 128 glyphs.) But, if you need the
10pt DNP-Mincho font, then you need following files. Each of them contains
255 glyphs, approx seven thousand glyphs in total.
dmjsy10.{tfm|300pk} (punctuations)
dmjroma10.{tfm|300pk} (alpha-numerics)
dmjhira10.{tfm|300pk} (hiraganas)
dmjkata10.{tfm|300pk} (katakanas)
dmjgreek10.{tfm|300pk} (greek characters)
dmjrussian10.{tfm|300pk} (cyrillic characters)
dmjkeisen10.{tfm|300pk} (line drawing characters)
dmjka10.{tfm|300pk} (kanjis - 1st level)
dmjkb10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkc10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkd10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjke10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkf10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkg10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkh10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjki10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkj10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkk10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkl10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkm10.{tfm|300pk} (kanjis - 2nd level)
dmjkn10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjko10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkp10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkq10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkr10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjks10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkt10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjku10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkv10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkw10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkx10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjky10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
dmjkz10.{tfm|300pk} ( " )
Imagine when you need several magnificatins to this, and `Mincho' is just
one font design in Japanese fonts. (A resource hog!)
----
Please note that jTeX did not modify the format of TeX font files. You
can use the DVI-wares written for TeX, without modification, to process
jTeX output DVI files. Even Imagen or LaserJet (which will not output
Japanese texts in general) will be able to output beautiful Japanese
texts.
Unfortunately, there is no public jTeX kanji font with better quality.
jTeX distribution contains JIS 24x24 fonts (*.tfm and *.pk) with several
magnifications, but I believe their quality is the same as what you have
already. --- It *is* a hard task to develop new kanji font from scratch
(you have to design several thousands of glyphs at a time!)
There is a proprietry jTeX kanji font called DNP kanji font, and widely
used by jTeX users. It is provided by Dai-Nippon-Printing, one of the
largest printing company in Japan. The data are provided in the form of
*.pk and *.tfm files (no *.mf files). Because this font is generated
directly from DNP's professional out-line font data, it has the quality
that can be used for professional publications. It comes with several
magnifications, and includes two fonts, `Mincho' and `Gothic', two major
Japanese fonts. --- Compared to them, JIS 24x24 is just a `courier'.
(But they cost you several ten-thousand yens.)
For further information on jTeX, Nihongo-TeX or DNP fonts, you should
better contact with the authors of Japanese TeX's. Here are their
network addresses, from the softwares' README's.
ryo-i@ascii.co.jp (Nihongo-TeX)
tony-o@ascii.co.jp ( " )
isozaji@ntt-20.ntt.jp (Nihongo-TeX)
a87480@tansei.cc.u-tokyo.ac.jp ( " )
(Some of above are JUNET addresses, not Internet addresses. So I am not
sure if your mails arrives of not. Someone other on net might be
knowlegeable than me..)
---
Because jTeX's kanji fonts occupy several ten-M bytes of disk space, you
will have difficulties installing them on PCs. One practical approach is
to use Japanese printers' internal kanji fonts. If you could provide
appropriate *.tfm files and DVI-wares, you do not have to install *.pk
files on you disk. When you use the kanji-PostScript printers, you can
get the professional quality. Some public Japanese dvi2ps programs use
this method and working fine. You can obtain them also, from above noted
Internet hosts. (But, kanji-PostScript printers will cost you several
hundred-thousand yens...)
Good luck and best regards;
Takashi Matsuzawa.
(Yokogawa-Hewlett-packard)
Email: mzw_t@apollo.hp.com