Subject: seminar on East Asian TeX in Munich planned.

From: [email-masked] (Pilch)
Date: Wed, 21 Oct 1992 10:12:06 GMT

A growing group of Chinese speaking TeX users wants to get together
to make their favorite layout system widely available, to establish
a common PD distribution similar to emTeX that can handle both
GB and BIG5 input and maybe even JIS and Korean.
A big problem we have to face, is, that any good fonts, ideally 
Metafont originals, will for the time being not be available for 
low or no cost, as is the case with the original TeX fonts.  It is
of course regrettable, that the East Asian governments don't see
providing such fonts as a public infrastructure expenditure.  But
for the time being we can at least support the growth of such an
infrastructure by pooling our knowledge and other resources and 
persuading some public institutions to buy currently available 
vector fonts, preferably in metafont format, or maybe get some 
rrivate snstitutions to provide high quality output as a service
to people who at home normally use pmTeX.
But solving the problem on the basis of Metafont rather than within 
the framework of some wholesale solution that eludes the outsider's 
eye in order to protect its own market position, is an urgent issue
of public and widely also oprivate interest, for which a few dozen
students and sholars will assemble in Munich next January.

The conference will be organized by the Gesellschaft fuer Chinesische
Informatik (society for Chinese informatics, GCI) and members of the
editing board of Chinesisch und COmputer (Chinese and Computer).
Although we won't be able to refund plane tickets, we would be grateful
for any hints on how to go about, which organisations can provide
fonts usable in connection with TeX, who has already a usable
version of EastAsian TeX to offer.

Hartmut Pilch
Adr: [Germany] D W 8000 Muenchen 21 Von-der-Pfordten-Str 9
Email: [email-masked]