Re: RH - question was: canna + kinput2

[Mike Fabian <mfabian@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com> writes:

> >>>>> "Andreas" == Andreas Marcel Riechert <riechert@example.com> writes:
> 
>     Andreas> What's jLaTex? ...The NTT-LaTeX I remember vaguely, or
>     Andreas> some other stuff?
> 
> Generic for Japanese-patched TeX-alikes.  I haven't checked recently,
> but at one point both NTT jTeX and ASCII pTeX failed TRIP 

What is TRIP?

> and so couldn't legally be called TeX (not that that stopped anyone :( ).  I
> haven't used NTT jTeX in 10 years, I think.  I've been using pTeX and
> pLaTeX since then.  But they have their problems, especially with
> mixed Japanese/foreign text.
> 
>     Andreas> An alternative on a standard TeX system -- especially if
>     Andreas> you basically write English or German with just a few
>     Andreas> kanji inside your text --is to use Werner Lembergs
>     Andreas> CJK-TeX. You will find it on CTAN.
> 
> You can probably get RPMs, I know you can get .debs, from the distros.
> 
> I've never used CJK-TeX much, but it seems pretty good.  It's just a
> little distracting (and scares my colleagues, who all use p[La]TeX).

Looks like both have their advantages. 

The newest Version of pTeX/pLaTeX is tetex based and seems to work
very good. It mostly adds stuff to a standard teTeX installation which
doesn't hurt the rest of teTeX, and patches the dvips(k) which comes
with teTeX. With the patched dvips(k) it produces Japanese PostScript
output, which probably will look very beautiful on a real Japanese
PostScript printer. I don't have a real Japanese PostScript printer
and use Ghostscript with the Wadalab CID-keyed fonts which also looks
OK. But I could not get Ghostscript to handle the vertical
font variants correctly, for example a small test PostScript file like

    /WadaMin-Bold-EUC-V findfont 300 scalefont setfont
    50 200 moveto <c3cb> show showpage

doesn't work, although the same file with /WadaMin-Bold-EUC-H instead
of /WadaMin-Bold-EUC-V works fine[1].  When aliasing /Ryumin-Light-V
to /WadaMin-Bold-H in Ghostscripts Fontmap, vertical text produced
with pLaTeX can be printed, but is not completely correct. Most
obviously the punctuation is incorrect, the spacing is also often
obviously wrong. But for the lucky owners of a "real" Japanese
PostScript printer, this problem probably does not exist.

CJK-LaTeX also works very nicely. The quality of the results mainly
depends on the quality of the available fonts. The free Wadalab
Postscript font are not bad, bad work only for horizontal typesetting.
The free Watanabe-mincho.ttf and Wadalab-gothic.ttf TrueType fonts
also work well for horizontal typesetting. When they are used for
vertical typesetting, the results are very bad (wrong spacing and
punctuation), as these font don't contain the additional information
needed for vertical typesetting.

I achieved the most beautiful results so far with CJK-LaTeX when
testing it with Microsofts msmincho.ttc and msgothic.ttc TrueType
fonts.  Even vertical typesetting works perfectly with these fonts.

Unfortunately there seem to be no free Japanese TrueType fonts
of comparable quality.


Footnotes: 
[1]  The Ghostscript error message for this testfile is:
mfabian@example.com:~$ /packages/stow/gs6.01/bin/gs ../otoko-vertical.ps
Aladdin Ghostscript 6.01 (2000-03-17)
Copyright (C) 2000 Aladdin Enterprises, Menlo Park, CA.  All rights reserved.
This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.
Loading WadaMin-Bold-EUC-V font from /opt/stow/gs6.01/share/ghostscript/fonts/WadaMin-Bold-EUC-V.gsf... Error: /undefinedresource in --findresource--
Operand stack:
   WadaMin-Bold-EUC-V   Font   WadaMin-Bold-EUC-V   235722   WadaMin-Bold-EUC-V   --nostringval--   WadaMin-Bold-EUC-V   (/opt/stow/gs6.01/share/ghostscript/fonts/WadaMin-Bold-EUC-V.gsf)   false   --nostringval--   WadaMin-Bold-EUC-V   WadaMin-Bold   (CID/Adobe-Japan1/CIDFont/WadaMin-Bold)   EUC-V   EUC-H   CMap   EUC-H
Execution stack:
   %interp_exit   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   2   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push   1   3   %oparray_pop   1   3   %oparray_pop   1   3   %oparray_pop   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   2   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   1   3   %oparray_pop   2   3   %oparray_pop   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push   5   4   %oparray_pop   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   %array_continue   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   %loop_continue   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   10   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   15   6   %oparray_pop   15   6   %oparray_pop   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   2   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   16   8   %oparray_pop   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--
Dictionary stack:
   --dict:929/983(ro)(G)--   --dict:0/20(G)--   --dict:66/200(L)--   --dict:16/24(G)--   --dict:929/983(ro)(G)--   --dict:66/200(L)--   --dict:34/34(ro)(G)--   --dict:4/12(L)--   --dict:14/14(G)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: 2
Current file position is 1205
Aladdin Ghostscript 6.01: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@example.com>