Jean-Marc Lasgouttes wrote:
Koji Yokota <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Yes, that's the problem. It should work well for a user who changed
the default converter of "latex -> DVI" to "platex" and writes only
Japanese exclusively. But once he begins to write French with the same
setting, he may face trouble in preview and output, unless he changes
the default converter back to "latex".
Should binaries be dynamically switched depending on languages?
I do not know how to handle that actually. Even worse, what if some
people try to make a document in french+japanese?
As far as babel is used, platex can cover most of major western
languages (maybe all languages) that babel supports, if a user has set
up necessary latex environment. (If babel is not used, one may get a
weird output with *no errors*.) So far, based on trustworthy information
on web, I could confirm that the following language could be handled
with babel & platex at least (with appropriate settings of latex):
English, Esperanto, Interlingua, Dutch, Afrikaaans, German (incl.
ngerman), Breton, Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Greek, French, Italian, Latin,
Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Basque, Romanian, Danish,
Icelandic, Norsk, Nynorsk, Swedish, Samin, Finnish, Magyar, Estonian,
Croatian, Cyech, Polish, Sebian, Slovak, Slovene, Russian, Bulgarian,
Ukrainian, Upper Sorbian, Lower Sorbian, Turkish, Bahasa, Copt,
Mongorian, Classical Greek.
For platex to coexist with Chinese and Korean, it's not straightforward.
In that case, the otfcjk package should be used (I haven't tested this
approach yet). Such a tex file should begin in UTF-8 with:
\documentclass{jarticle}
\usepackage[multi]{otf}
\usepackage{mlotf}
\begin{document}
... Japanese or English ...
\begin{繁体中文}
... Taiwanese ...
\end{繁体中文}
\begin{簡体中文}
... Mainland Chinese ...
\end{簡体中文}
\begin{ハングル}
... Korean ...
\end{ハングル}
and convert it to SJIS (EUC and JIS also possible?) using
utf8toutf cjk.tex cjk-sjis.tex
(conversion via iconv also works?) and apply platex to compile. I think
I need to test this approach more before including Chinese and Korean
support with platex.
If one wants to include more languages such as Thai, Mongolian or
Vietnamese, more tweaks are needed (but possible). This is not a problem
of platex, but because of localisation of these languages.
I personally think that the coverage above is sufficient for non-CJK
Japanese to begin with. If someone wants to include more languages he
should rely on CJK + unicode setting at the expense of quality (and that
seems what TeX users are normally doing).
Koji
