What I was trying to explain was the following: even if the software supports
UTF-8 / unicode, then that does not necessarily mean that it supports ("out of
the box") all your typographical wishes and demands.
The OP was referring to several complicated typesetting tasks. My advice is: do
not stare yourself blind on support for unicode alone. If you need several
complicated typesetting tasks, check out the various classes, packages and
tex-engine as a whole. Especially if you are using a more or less traditional
alphabet and you do not need to use Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian,
Ethiopian, Cambodian, Thai and Hindi in one document, you can just as well use
the traditional versions of latex/
As far as up(La)TeX is concerned: yes, there is upLaTeX, which is the best
Japanese language version of LaTeX as far as I am concerned, and which my
students often use. I prefer LuaLaTeX because upLaTeX does not support PDF
inclusion.
Wilfred
On Sunday, April 29, 2018 1:12 AM, Arthur Reutenauer
<arthur.reutena...@normalesup.org> wrote:
> Second, about unicode, my experiences are mixed. I use Japanese as my main
> language of communication. I found that "plain XeLaTeX" is not really
> adequate for Japanese as it lacks many common features; LuaLaTeX performs
> better, but still not as good as the pre-UTF-8 special "Japanese LaTeX"
> called "platex". In other words, even if XeLaTeX can typeset all unicode
> characters, you still need proper fonts, and special typesetting (such as
> indents, hyphenation rules, etc) may not be perfect.
In yet other words, the features you miss are about Japanese
typesetting, not Unicode. This is an important distinction since the
original poster doesn’t need to typeset Japanese.
As a an aside, if you’re talking about pTeX you should really mention
its UTF-8 extension, upTeX.
> If you are looking for something which based on TeX but closer to DTP
> software, check out ConTeXt. ConTeXt has been used for many complex,
> professional typesetting jobs, and the developers are very active in trying
> to find new solutions if needed. IIRC the current version of ConTeXt supports
> at least LuaLaTeX which provides support for UTF-8
The version that’s currently actively developed, Mark IV (mkiv) is
focused on LuaTeX, while the earlier version, Mark II, is more or less
frozen and supports pdfTeX and XeTeX.
Best,
Arthur
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