Subject: Chinese in TeX documents

From: "Stephen G. Simpson (814)863-0775" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 90 00:16:00 EST

Hi everybody,

Sorry, my posting got cut off in the middle.  Here is the full version.

The purpose of this posting is to give a comparative review of two free
software packages for inclusion of Chinese in TeX documents.

For those who don't know, TeX is a widely used mathematical typesetting
and docuement preparation system, created by Donald Knuth.  With a laser
printer or typesetter, TeX produces high quality documents and it is
particularly good at handling mathematical formulas, tables, diagrams,
etc.  TeX runs on all kinds of computers, but I have used it only on UNIX
machines.

Rumor says that there are commercial Chinese TeX systems in Taiwan.  I
don't know anything specific.  Can anybody confirm this or provide more
information?

Printer fonts for TeX are produced by another program, Metafont.  John
Hobby, an associate of Knuth, has written some Metafont code for Chinese
characters.  It is available for anonymous ftp on june.cs.washington.edu.
Has anybody here looked at this stuff?  Does it work?  Does it produce
high quality Chinese characters?  Does it include the most frequently used
characters?

I know of two free software packages for including Chinese in TeX
documents.  They are Chtex by Jingbai Wang, and Poor Man's Chinese by
Thomas Ridgeway.  Both systems accept TeX documents containing a mixture
of ASCII and GB-coded Chinese characters.  Either system could be modified
so as to accept BIG-5 codes rather than GB.

I have been using Chtex for about a year.  It is essentially a TeX
preprocessor which also generates PostScript code based on the 24x24 CCLIB
Chinese character bitmaps.  You postprocess your DVI file with a specially
hacked DVI-to-PostScript driver, then prepend the PostScript-coded
bitmaps.

The advantages of Chtex are the following:
1.  It uses CCLIB bitmaps directly.  You don't need Chinese TeX fonts.
2.  It allows PostScript scaling of any portion of the document,
including the Chinese characters.

The disadvantages of Chtex are:
1.  It is a little clumsy to use.
2.  It requires a PostScript printer.
3.  It works only with Jingbai Wang's specially hacked DVI-to-PostScript
driver for UNIX.  This is bad because Wang's driver is defective in a
number of ways.  It does not handle mathematical formulas correctly, it
does not support the current version of psfig, and it does not accept
8-bit characters.  (The current version of TeX allows 8-bit characters,
but Wang's driver cannot process them.)

Chtex is available for anonymous ftp on crl.nmsu.edu.

Poor Man's Chinese is essentially a TeX include file which defines macros
for interpreting GB-coded Chinese.  To print the resulting DVI files, you
need Chinese TeX fonts.  The author of Poor Man's Chinese provides a way
to create these fonts.  Namely, he gives you a C program which reads the
24x24 CCLIB bitmaps, outputs Metafont code, then calls Metafont to create
Chinese TeX fonts in any resolution you desire.

The advantage of Poor Man's Chinese are:
1.  It is easy to use.
2.  It does not require a PostScript printer or any particular DVI device
driver.  Theoretically, it should work with any up-to-date TeX system,
version 3.0 or later.

The disadvantages of Poor Man's Chinese are:
1.  Chinese TeX fonts take up a lot of disk space.  One 300 dpi printer
font takes about 3 megabytes, even though they were generated from the
24x24 CCLIB bitmaps which amount to only half a megabyte.  (However, each
Chinese TeX font contains the GB character set in two different sizes.)
2.  Poor Man's Chinese needs an up-to-date TeX system.  Older TeX systems
and DVI device drivers cannot handle 8-bit bytes and therefore will not
support PMC.  (In my case, I had to upgrade our entire TeX system, and I
could find only one 8-bit DVI device driver for UNIX, dvips version 5.4.)

Poor Man's Chinese is available for anonymous ftp from
blackbox.hacc.washington.edu.

On the whole, I think that Chtex may be more convenient now for some
users, but Poor Man's Chinese is a cleaner approach and represents the
future.

Stephen G. Simpson

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 90 22:51:22 MST

>Rumor says that there are commercial Chinese TeX systems in Taiwan.
>I don't know anything specific.  Can anybody confirm this or provide
>more information?

I have heard somewhere on the net that Taiwan is not too far from
having Internet access.  Hopefully, very soon!

>Printer fonts for TeX are produced by another program, Metafont.
>John Hobby, an associate of Knuth, has written some Metafont code for
>Chinese characters.  It is available for anonymous ftp on
>june.cs.washington.edu.  Has anybody here looked at this stuff?  Does
>it work?  Does it produce high quality Chinese characters?  Does it
>include the most frequently used characters?

If your talking about the file "chinese.tar.Z" on
june.cs.washington.edu, I got a copy of it some time ago and spent
time trying to make it work with MF82.  No success.  It looks like it
was done with a very early version of MF.  I don't know enough MF to
adapt it.

>but Wang's driver cannot process them.)

I have fixed dvi2ps 3.1 to handle ChTeX output, and it will be
available for anonymous ftp Teus Dec 18 from crl.nmsu.edu.  I'll post
an announcement.  I haven't tested dvi2ps to see if it handles the
8-bit characters yet, but when someone does, please alert us :-)

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