Sorry to bother you developers, but I could not find the answers anywhere else. I'm not actually trying to use LyX, but want to develop some simple code of my own (in PHP, in case you care) that uses some flavor of TeX. In my case I need it to do UTF-8 and vertical text (for printing addresses from a database onto Japanese envelopes). I ran across LyX, and can see that it supports UTF-8 and CJK, so if it also can write vertically, then I would like to know what TeX engine it uses. But I don't see any mention of vertical text in your docs or even mailing list archives. The Japanese mailing list is not very active, and I'm suspecting your regular lyx-users list subscribers won't know the answer, so I'm posting here.
There is a TeX flavor that in theory does what I need (called upTeX/upLaTeX), but I have failed to figure out how to install it (I'm more of a web programmer, not a Linux system guru) - the single-sentence build "instructions" assume far more understanding than I have. My VPS (CentOS) already has ptex, which does Japanese in vertical text, but it does not support UTF-8 (Europeans living in Japan might get their names messed up by the encoding conversion). So I thought that if LyX has the right capabilities, I might install LyX just to get whatever underlying engine it uses. Or if that's the wrong way to go about this (I consider that likely!) and you have a better suggestion, I'm all ears. My end goal is not TeX code but PDF (my users will simply access my application with a browser and no special software), but there are no PHP libraries that do vertical text in PDFs (that I know of). Although I'm new to TeX, it does look like a truly excellent tool for this and other tasks. Thank you, Karen
