Re: [Texmacs-dev] Chinese Localization Issues

[Joris van der Hoeven]

On Thu, Oct 03, 2013 at 04:18:00PM +0800, jiazhaoconga wrote:
> >> I think the length unit is pt.
> >
> > This is usually much smaller than one character.
> > What is the (LaTeX) length unit for the horizontal width of a character
> > (and for the height of a character in cases where width and height
> > do not coincide)?
> 
> If the document font size is 10pt, the width and height of a Chinese
> character is 10 pt.

OK, perfect, that means that 'quad' (quad space) is the right unit.

> > What are your suggested substitutes for 'italic' and 'small caps'?
> > I.e., is there some distinctive property about the 'look and feel' of
> > a CJK font to make it suitable as an 'italic' or 'small caps' font?
> 
> http://ustcscgy.github.io/images/fonts.png
> It's roman, italic, and bold above and "song", "kai", "hei" below.
> So, font "kai" for italic and font "hei" for small caps.

I meant 'small caps' for small capitals, not bold.
You use 'hei' as as bold font in the example.

TeXmacs requires adequate fonts for

  italic       (emphasized text)
  bold         (strong text)
  small caps   (names)
  sans serif   (laptop presentations, menus in documentation, etc.)
  typewriter   (keyboard input)
  monospaced   (listings, always the case in the case of Chinese)

Sometimes, these properties are mixed.
For instance, bold small caps could be used as a title font,
in the same way that Chinese apparently like to use bold sans serif.


> Those fonts look like they have slightly different size, but they are
> all in the same size font box. The stroke is the main difference.
>
> >  - Text does not really look justified when a line ends with a ponctuation
> >    symbol, because CJK ponctuation symbols have the logical width of
> >    a character, but a much smaller "ink width".  Any ideas about what
> >    I should do about this problem?  Leave it as is, or try to somehow
> >    work with the real widths of ponctuation symbols?
> 
> > The only remaining issue concerns ponctuation symbols at the end of lines.
> 
> What they originally do in LaTeX:
>   - define a minus glue on each side of symbol for every punctuation.
>     When line break happens, cancel the right side of glue.

I thought about this, since it basically means to change the width of
the glyph together with its spacing properties.

However, I do not see a reliable way to determine the required 'munus glue'.
This seems to heavily depend on the Chinese font being used.
Also, the ponctuation glyph is sometimes left aligned in the glyph box,
and centered at other occasions.  When it is centered, then I probably
should remove some space at the left hand side as well.
At any rate, I don't understand what I am supposed to do exactly.
Any ideas?

>   - define kerning for pairs of punctuation symbols, when these two symbols 
> are
>     side by side, use kerning and cancel the glue between them.
> 
> And there are a lot of other rules. The punctuation problem is more 
> complicated
> than I originally thought:
> 
> English punctuation symbols provided by Chinese fonts are total disaster.

I indeed noticed that they occur in a few of the translated TeXmacs 
documentation pages,
and they look less nice than native Chinese punctuation symbols.  I modified 
the CJK support
to take them into account appropriately concerning the spacing; I might 
addionally perform
glyph substitution if you think that this would be nice.  Alternatively, I 
might provide
a correction facility to do the necessary replacements throughout a document.

> New problem, some punctuation symbols such as quote mark can not input, but 
> can
> be pasted in. This problem also exists in 1.0.7.20.

Could you please detail a bit more?  On which keyboard?  Which unicode symbol?  
Etc.

Best wishes, --Joris