Re: [Texmacs-dev] Chinese Localization Issues

[Joris van der Hoeven]

Hi,

Thanks for the detailed guidelines for Chinese typesetting.

Would it be possible to send us a short example text which
illustrates the various points, with how things should
or should not be done?

On Wed, Oct 02, 2013 at 01:23:05PM +0800, jiazhaoconga wrote:
> First of all, all these localization settings should be able to turn
> on or turn off by user, TeXmacs should provided good default settings.

Does this mean that the various conventions that you mention might
vary according to the context.  For instance, should I understand that
some Chinese do put spaces between words, and that others don't,
but that the latter is more frequent?

By the way, do you know whether the same defaults would be good for
Japanese and Korean, or whether we should do something different for
those languages?

> 1. Space. Chinese words/lines don't need space character to separate,
> so ignore spaces and line breaks(by default) when import from LaTeX
> and ignore spaces in TeXmacs unless input by '\ ' or '\,'. Space
> character between Chinese-Chinese are ignored, space character between
> Chinese-English is ignored but extra space should be inserted
> automatically, and can be configured.
> 
> LaTeX package CJK provides two environments: "CJK" and "CJK*", the
> latter one ignores spaces, and the former one treat spaces as one
> space. High level LaTeX package ctex ignores spaces by default. Most
> users ignore spaces so that line breaks don't bring extra spaces and
> they can write one paragraph in multilines and indent them in nested
> environments.
> 
> So, please use "CJK*" environment by default, fix corresponding lines
> in  SVN r7347.

So you are saying that we should not put any spaces between words?
When line breaking, is it possible to line break in the middle of a word?

> 2. Indent. Chinese paragraphs indent by width of two Chinese
> characters(all Chinese characters have same width), few exception.

Should we have a length unit for the width of a character? em?
How to determine it from the font (I noticed that most characters
have exactly the same width most of the time; I probably should
use that fact)?

As you may have noticed, TeXmacs uses indentation in 'article' style,
but not in 'generic' style, where paragraphs are separated by a large
vertical space.  Similar conventions make sense in Chinese?

What about indentation inside list environments?
Is the default behaviour OK?

> 3. Punctuation. Punctuation characters should not take a full width of
> normal Chinese character, that's too wide. And punctuation characters
> can be compressed more when required.

This brings me to the issue of line breaking: I guess that you need
the equivalent of justified text.  If I understand you well,
then the only spaces which I am allowed to expand or compress are
spaces around punctuation characters.  Am I allowed to put very tiny
additional spaces around characters themselves when needed
(e.g. for lines without any punctation characters)?

> 4. Line break algorithm. A line should not begin with punctuation characters.

Am I allowed to break lines after any character
except before a punctuation character?

> 5. Font. Chinese font is very different from english font.

I see; so you suggest that the font menu should be adapted in
the case of Chinese?  Anyway, a new font browser is being developed,
you can test it by 'Tools -> Experimental -> New style fonts'.
Please let me know of your comments.

The reason that this is not yet the default is that Max started to
develop a native Pdf renderer which will allow us to export all these
newly supported fonts as outline fonts.

> We don't have italic font because it's ugly, another shape of font is used for
> emphasize or annotation. And Chinese "bold" font is often another sans
> serif font used in section captions.

Do you suggest that we modify the 'em' and 'strong' tags so as
to use different fonts / bold sans serif fonts?

> So TeXmacs needs to support a family of Chinese fonts to get properly
> typesetting results. Fandol is a free Chinese font family:
> http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/fandol

I will check these fonts.  We might support them indeed.

> And english characters in Chinese font is ugly, so use English font
> for english characters in Chinese documents.

What is suggested for the English font to be used with a particular Chinese 
font.
How is this kind of thing implemented in other word processing software?

E.g., do you need two environment variables, one for the Chinese font and
one for the feedback font for non Chinese characters?

Thanks again for your help, which is very much appreciated.
I am trying to understand very precisely what has to be done
before starting to implement a better solution.

Best wishes, --Joris