Re: CJK in (auctex)I18n

Masayuki Ataka <[email protected]> writes:

> From: Masayuki Ataka <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: CJK in (auctex)I18n
> Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2005 03:30:41 +0900 (JST)
>
>> > That's what I think I understand from the matter.  It may be that
>> > Korean support is behind that of Japanese (MULE was contributed by a
>> > Japanese university project IRC).  But I believe in general that
>> > "usable for CJK" just means MULE.  I am copying Werner Lemberg with
>> > this message, maybe he knows more about it.  Also some of our Japanese
>> > contributors probably have more of a clue.
>> > 
>> > Basically, I guess the manual entry should be revised.
>> 
>> I agree.  I'll fix the document.
>
> Here is the revised draft.
>
> | There are several problems associated with editing non-English
> | @TeX{} with GNU Emacs.  @TeX{} are usable for European (Latin,
> | Cyrillic, Greek) based languages.
>
> I'm not sure `XEmacs --without-mule' is usable for European
> based languages.

It is usable for 8bit encodings quite well, so it can cater for most
of the European 8bit character sets, though only one at a time.  That
is the reason that the unconditional inclusion of MULE into Emacs-20
historically caused quite a few people to switch to XEmacs since they
would not want to be exposed to the early instabilities and
performance issues of MULE without apparent need.

With utf-8 having become as widespread as it is nowadays, MULE is a
good thing to have in a well-tested state.

> | For @acronym{CJK} (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) language,
> | @acronym{MULE, MULtilingual Enhancement to GNU Emacs} supported
> | Emacsen are needed.  @acronym{MULE, MULtilingual Enhancement to
> | GNU Emacs} is part of GNU Emacs from Emacs 20; XEmacs should be
> | configured with @samp{--with-mule} option.  Special versions of
> | @TeX{} are needed for @acronym{CJK}; ASCII p@TeX{} and NTT j@TeX{}
> | for Japanese; H@LaTeX{} and k@TeX{} for Korean; and
> | @acronym{CJK}-@LaTeX{} package for @acronym{CJK}.
>
> How does Chinese use TeX?  Is there TeX specialized for Chinese?

No idea.

> I installed and tried CJK-LaTeX yesterday.  I think that the week
> point is lack of information to CJK-LaTeX.  It works with Japanese,
> but I couldn't find how to change font family.  I know this ML is
> not for TeX and CJK-LaTeX.  The point is ,at the present point,
> CJK-LaTeX can not substitute pTeX and jTeX.

It could well be that CJK-LaTeX is mostly intended for critical work:
papers in English or other languages written by scholars _about_ works
in Chinese.  I also seem to remember that there is a special Emacs
mode by Werner Lemberg for inputting the CJK-LaTeX transcriptions.

> AFAIK, There is Unicode based TeX (Omega and Lambda).  But I don't
> knwo how to run it on my computer.  Where to find them and their
> information.  Is it still continued the development?

Omega is by now more or less developed by two separate small teams led
by the original developers with one or two programmers on each team.
Their interests have diverged, and in particular John Plaice,
responsible for most of the code base, has pretty much lost interest.
However, _both_ John and Yannis are hardly renowned for keeping the
public involved, so the development of Omega, though leading to
interesting talks at TeX conferences at times, is mostly uninteresting
to the community.

There are format variants built on earlier released versions, and
Giuseppe Bilotta maintains Aleph, a reasonably stable branch of Omega
with eTeX extensions.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum