Hello, I am one of the users on “TeX Forum” (a forum for Japanese TeX users, http://oku.edu.mie-u.ac.jp/tex/) and argued on this topic with Clemente Beghi the other day. It is my first post to this ML.
I have read the argument on this thread and inspected gezhu package and sfkanbun package (a pLaTeX package for writing kunten). Here is my thought on this issue. I apologize in advance that I do not provide any actual solution here.... When properly typesetting Japanese and/or Chinese with Xe(La)TeX, there are two thing that are very intricate but yet indispensable: space adjustment (around punctuations and at alphabet-CJK boundaries) and automatic font switch (between non-CJK and CJK). The packages xeCJK and zhspacing both do those jobs (so they conflict with each other). (Unfortunately there is no package (at least on CTAN) that is sufficient for formal Japanese typesetting (in Japan), but I think xeCJK in ‘fullwidth’ pucntuation style will do permissible job.) Such packages employs \XeTeXinterchartoks intervention in its own way, and then I had believed that higher level process like kunten and warichu must be deeply dependent on internals of CJK modules (i.e. xeCJK and zhspacing). However, it seems that the functioning of gezhu package is not related with any CJK settings; in fact, gezhu works along with xeCJK, zhspacing, or 8-bit LaTeX plus CJK. Likewise, I think the adaptation of sfkanbun package to other CJK-aware LaTeX environment is not so difficult as I first thought. Some additional notices: - Although the whole kunten processing indeed involves some (wierd kind of) ruby positioning (i.e. okurigana), kunten itself (re-ten, ichi-ni-ten, etc.) is not in “left-ruby” position, but resides at the left-bottom of a kanji to be annotated, that is, kunten goes between kanji. - As is clearly stated in the documentation of zhspacing, vertical CJK typesetting in XeLaTeX has major drawback that mixing alphabet and CJK will produce ugly results because of the different internal baseline settings between alphabet and CJK fonts. This will not hurt you when writing classical documents, but will make XeLaTeX less attractive for modern vertical-writing usage. - I am also interested in the topic of Polyglossia setup for Japanese. But I would like to talk on it when I have more free time.... Anyway, I strongly believe it is necessary to give XeLaTeX the ability to typeset Japanese documents that are acceptable in Japan, as well as outside, because the time will be inevitably come for Japanese TeX users to migrate from pTeX to modern Unicode-aware TeX, i.e. XeTeX and/or LuaTeX. Best regards, Tak Yato -------------------------------------- GyaO! - Anime, Dramas, Movies, and Music videos [FREE] http://pr.mail.yahoo.co.jp/gyao/ -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
