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From: ham@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Peter R. Ham)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex,comp.text,fj.comp.text,fj.comp.texhax
Subject: Japanese TeX and non-linear glue
Message-ID: <HAM.90Jul27183857@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 28 Jul 90 01:38:57 GMT
Sender: news@Neon.Stanford.EDU (USENET News System)
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Organization: Stanford University
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I know little about TeX and less about Japanese typesetting but I heard
the following:

TeX's linear boxes and glue model is not sufficient for typesetting
quality Japanese documents, because some special characters like ","
have only two appearances: full width and half width and nothing
in between.

I have the following questions:

1) If a half width "," is used when a full width one would be more
optimal in appearance or vice-versa, do high quality Japanese
typesetters care?
2) What about using variable width "," characters? Is that ok, or
does it look funny?
3) Is there a way in the linear TeX boxes and glue model to get the
above behavior?
4) Is a non-linear boxes and glue model expensive? Ie. is it widely
ineffecient.
5) Are there any papers on Japanese typsetting algorithms that
have been translated to English?

Peter


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