ubuntu-developer-manual team mailing list archive

[Kevin Godby <godbyk@xxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings.

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 3:39 PM, Kyle Nitzsche
<kyle.nitzsche@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Thank you Kevin,
>
> Your explanation of the toolchain (below) is essential and helps me (and
> probably others) understand how the pieces fit together.
>
> Regarding language support: I feel somewhat reassured, but, it's hard to
> know how much work is needed to support, for example, Chinese/Simplified and
> Chinese/Traditional.
>
> So my QUESTION is:
> Is adding Chinese/Simplified support simply a matter of doing some amount of
> well understood work or are there unsolved technical issues? Can you
> characterize the amount of work that would be required?

I'm not familiar with the peculiarities of typesetting Chinese
(simplified or traditional), so I can't give you a good answer right
off.  We'd have to look into it.  I know that it's possible to typeset
it with XeLaTeX.  We'd have to add language support to polyglossia.
We'd need to find suitable fonts.  We may need to create collation
rules for the indexer.  AFAIK, there's no hyphenation in Chinese, so
we wouldn't have to worry about that.

You can look at the PDFs here for some examples of Chinese typeset with XeTeX:

  http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/render_download.php?&format=file&media_id=xetex_chinese_sample&filename=xetex_chinese_sample.zip

(Found at http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=xetex_download.)

I couldn't read those files with evince, but they worked fine with
xpdf.  (Evince seems to dislike AAT fonts, I think.)

Note that those PDFs were generated by using the low-level XeTeX font
commands (i.e., they didn't use fontspec), and they didn't use
polyglossia (which is fine as there's only one language in that
document).

--Kevin