In our Linux lab, a student asked for installation of Chinese support. We have machines with TeXLive-2007 and LyX 1.5.6 or 1.6.1. I spent most of the afternoon and evening trying to figure out what might be the bare minimum change needed so that a person can write & print documents in Chinese via LyX. It is confusing mainly because there are a lot of half-finished ways to do this. Should we use the separate package LyX-CJK or LyX with Unicode font support or LyX with CJK font support.
After installing a lot of packages for latex-cjk support and the scim tool for multi-language input, I arrived at a working version of LyX that could accept Chinese characters that would show on the screen, but none of the Lyx View options would work. I was stuck on that problem for a long time. Errors kept saying that the Chinese symbols were not recognized or fonts were missing. It may be I did not have the preamble or Language options specified correctly, I tried many things. I saw on the LyX Wiki that Japanese and Chinese are supposed to work "out of the box," ( ) but I don't see how The Debian readme with latex-cjk explains how a commercial font Cyberbit.ttf can be obtained and installed (Wow, that's a big project). After that, I do succeed with latex in compiling a example file UTF8.tex that comes with latex-cjk. I even succeeded in building a LyX file that does work! It surprised me a bit that the proper character is simply utf8 and the language English. None of the encodings for CJK worked. I put the pdf output and the lyx file here so you can see for yourselves. (Remember, the fonts from Cyberbit.ttf are needed). http://pj.freefaculty.org/latex/UTF8.pdf http://pj.freefaculty.org/latex/UTF8.lyx I don't know if the result is "nice looking" in the eyes of a Chinese reader, but I bet I'll find out later. If you have a lyx file that works with Chinese characters that does not require such an exotic font, I wish you'd share your example. We found another alternative that seems to work. XeTeX is described in the LyX wiki (http://wiki.lyx.org/LyX/XeTeX). I took the document xetex.lyx and followed its instructions and, to my surprise, xelatex did work! If you look to the bottom of the pdf, you see the Chinese characters do print. http://pj.freefaculty.org/latex/xetex.lyx http://pj.freefaculty.org/latex/xetex.pdf I was even able to use LyX preferences to create a new output format PDF(xetex) and configure it so the Lyx View menu would trigger xetex. It would be hard to describe the pointing and clicking, but here is the bit from my LyX preferences file, and I believe if you add these lines under FORMATS and CONVERTERS, then you will have same benefit. # # FORMATS SECTION ########################## # \format "pdf4" "pdf" "PDF(xelatex)" "" "xdg-open" "" "document,vector" # # CONVERTERS SECTION ########################## # \converter "pdflatex" "pdf4" "xelatex $$i " "latex" # lyx At the end of the day, I suppose I've made some progress, but the road forward does not seem so clear to me. Should I tell the students to focus on using Xetex or latex with Unicode. -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 University of Kansas
