Re: [Texmacs-dev] Chinese Localization Issues

[jiazhaoconga]

> 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?

I will post a web page showing how TeXmacs and LaTeX deal with
each point. I will give the link later.

> 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?

The CJK and ctex LaTeX package provide many options, but in fact
Chinese typesetting conventions don't vary much.

The space problems exist in "source code", Chinese don't use space to
separate characters and group them into words. Because there are
thousands of Chinese "character", and "word" is usually made of less than
four "character". Extra spaces have no use in final typesetting but help
improve LaTeX source readability. This is not a problem for TeXmacs
because WYSIWYG, you are not editing TeXmacs source directly.
So users should respond for not input extra space and not abuse spaces
to create alignment.
Space problem is a LaTeX problem, it influences TeXmacs in "latex import"
part.

> 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?

I take a look at one Japanese pdf, they use two characters indent every
paragraph.  Kern­ing of punc­tu­a­tion marks should be taken care in both CJK.

> 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?

TeXmacs allows multi-spaces after an english character, so it's user's
willing to put spaces after Chinese character. The concept of "word"
doesn't play a role in Chinese typesetting. A paragraph is made of
characters and punc­tu­a­tions, line break can happen everywhere, but
line break before punc­tu­a­tion will look bad.

Because no space is actually necessary in Chinese paragraph, and
hyphenation problem does not exist in Chinese, TeXmacs should
give line breaks automatically(a long line without english character and
space!).

> 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)?

I think the length unit is pt. Chinese is famous for it's square shape,
usually Chinese characters shares same height and width, but it's not
so true in opentype? Treat Chinese characters as they have same width
and height is good enough for now.

> 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?

It's OK to have paragraphs separated by a large vertical space instead of
indent in generic style. In some styles, every paragraph is indent except the
first one in each section.

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

OK.

> 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)?

Yes, this is about punc­tu­a­tion kerning. Tiny additional spaces
around characters
is allowed.

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

Yes.

>> 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.

TeXmacs seems only recognize fonts listed in `TeXmacs/fonts/font-database.scm`
but not system fonts?

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

Yes, that should happen automatically.

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

I change their name so that TeXmacs can recognize them.


>> 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?

In LaTeX, the CJK package masks english character entries in map file
or something
like that. CM fonts are fine when used with Chinese documents. I think
we need two
environment variables for two fonts.