ham@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Peter R. Ham) (07/28/90)
I know little about TeX and less about Japanese typesetting but I heard the following: TeX's linear boxes and glue model is not sufficient for typesetting quality Japanese documents, because some special characters like "," have only two appearances: full width and half width and nothing in between. I have the following questions: 1) If a half width "," is used when a full width one would be more optimal in appearance or vice-versa, do high quality Japanese typesetters care? 2) What about using variable width "," characters? Is that ok, or does it look funny? 3) Is there a way in the linear TeX boxes and glue model to get the above behavior? 4) Is a non-linear boxes and glue model expensive? Ie. is it widely ineffecient. 5) Are there any papers on Japanese typsetting algorithms that have been translated to English? Peter --
dhosek@sif.claremont.edu (Hosek, Donald A.) (07/28/90)
In article <HAM.90Jul27183857@Neon.Stanford.EDU>, ham@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Peter R. Ham) writes... >I know little about TeX and less about Japanese typesetting but I heard >the following: >TeX's linear boxes and glue model is not sufficient for typesetting >quality Japanese documents, because some special characters like "," >have only two appearances: full width and half width and nothing >in between. Ahh, Japanese typesetting. An interesting topic to say the least... >I have the following questions: >1) If a half width "," is used when a full width one would be more >optimal in appearance or vice-versa, do high quality Japanese >typesetters care? On the topic of the comma, the two versions are used depending on whether the comma appears in a horizontal line of Japanese text or a vertical line of Japanese text. For vertical typesetting, the comma should be centered while for horizontal typesetting, it should be close to the preceding character. In current practice, a half width comma does occasionally appear in vertical typesetting, but I think that it is viewed with some distaste among those readers of Japanese who have refined tastes in typography (in much the same way that Western readers with refined typographic tastes groan at some of the atrocities created with DTP systems). >2) What about using variable width "," characters? Is that ok, or >does it look funny? In horizontal typesetting it's OK. In vertical typesetting, the best results are given by horizontally centering each character as the column is typeset, so if that is done, good results can still be achieved. >3) Is there a way in the linear TeX boxes and glue model to get the >above behavior? Yes. >4) Is a non-linear boxes and glue model expensive? Ie. is it widely >ineffecient. No. In fact, ASCII corporation, who have taken Japanese TeX under their wing, have modified TeX to handle typesetting of vertical material. This approach is in fact more efficient than using an unmodified TeX (I wrote some macros for handling this sort of thing, but it's a hairy problem and I don't like the macros). >5) Are there any papers on Japanese typsetting algorithms that >have been translated to English? TUGboat has had a few articles on Japanese typesetting in previous issues (relevant issues are 9#2, 10#4, and the proceedings from 1987 and 1988) and TUGboat 11#4 (the 1990 proceedings issue) will have an article detailing the ASCII corporation modifications to TeX. Dan Berry at UCLA has written a version of troff that handles tri-directional typesetting (for documents mixing Arabic, Chinese and Armenian, say) and has written a report describing his efforts. I believe he monitors this group, so I'll let him describe his efforts himself. -dh --- Don Hosek TeX, LaTeX, and Metafont Consulting and dhosek@ymir.claremont.edu production work. Free Estimates. dhosek@ymir.bitnet uunet!jarthur!ymir Phone: 714-625-0147