chinese

More Ways to Typeset CJK

Posted on by Malaysian LaTeX User Group

Rather a long time ago, I wrote about how to typeset CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) in pdfLaTeX, using the CJK and ctex packages. However, the font choices are rather limited. With CJK, you have only the wadalab (3 Japanese fonts) and arphic (2 Simplified Chinese fonts, 2 Traditional Chinese fonts) packages and 1 Korean font. If you have access to Windows fonts, the ctex packages further configures 6 Chinese fonts shipped with Windows for use in pdfLaTeX (may also work with dvi output, but I didn’t test).

More Fonts in XƎLaTeX: xeCJK

If you’re willing to use XƎLaTeX, the xeCJK package makes it a breeze to typeset CJK, using any font (TTF or OTF) installed on your operating system. The following uses Chinese fonts typically found on a Mac:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xeCJK}
 
% Sets font for Roman text.
% There are also \setsansfont, \setmonofont.
% See fontspec documentation.
\setmainfont{Baskerville}
 
% Traditional Chinese typesetting has no "bold" nor "italic".
% 黑体 ("blackbody") and 楷体 ("regular script") fonts are
% used instead.
\setCJKmainfont[BoldFont=Hei,ItalicFont=Kai]{STSong}
\setCJKsansfont{Hiragino Sans GB}
\setCJKmonofont{STFangsong}
 
\begin{document}
春眠不觉晓，\emph{处处}闻\textbf{啼鸟}。
\textsf{夜来风雨声，}\texttt{花落知多少？}
\end{document}

The fonts are identified by their names as displayed in your OS‘ font manager application. Here’s the output:

More Fonts in pdfLaTeX: zhmCJK

If you absolutely need to use pdfLaTeX instead of XƎLaTeX, the new zhmCJK package is useful for introducing more CJK font choices into you documents. It’s not included in MikTeX nor TeXLive, however; so you will have to download it from CTAN and install manually: read the instructions carefully.

The zhmCJK packages make use of the premise that all CJK fonts share the same metrics (note that this is not true for Japanese half-width characters! Use ptex if you have serious needs for Japanese typesetting), and can therefore create the NFSS font definition and actual font mappings dynamically. The consequence is that zhmCJK can use TrueType CJK fonts to generate PDF output with pdfTeX or with the dvipdfmx driver. Here’s an example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{zhmCJK}
\setCJKmainfont[BoldFont=simhei.ttf, ItalicFont=simkai.ttf]{HanNomA.ttf}
 
\begin{document}
世界，你好！
\end{document}

You will need to pass the file name of the TTF font, which must have no space characters and only ASCII characters. And for LaTeX to find the TTF files, you need to do one of the following:

  • Set OSFONTDIR in texmf.cnf
  • Move or symlink the TTF file in TEXMF/fonts/truetype
  • Move or symlink the TTF file in the same directory as your document.

ChinaTeX Interview

Posted on by Malaysian LaTeX User Group

As you may guess from the name, ChinaTeX is a TeX resources website from China. They’ve done a good job rounding up TeX resources from around the Web, and translating them to Chinese for the benefit of Chinese users. Their latest endeavors over the weekend was to provide video tutorials.

Recently ChinaTeX approached me for an e-mail interview. We talked mainly about how I came to know, love and use LaTeX in book design and typesetting. Thanks for the interview, guys! 有空再来坐坐、交流，谢谢！

CJK support in LaTeX

Posted on by Malaysian LaTeX User Group

(Oh gosh. This is one post I should have written a loooong time ago.)

Najmi has previous posted about Jawi support on LaTeX. Well then, what about CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) characters?

(The process may be simpler using XƎLaTeX, but I personally use LaTeX more, so this post won’t touch on XƎLaTeX.)

Short snippets

If you need only short CJK snippets, use the CJK package. (While you’re at it, you may as well grab cjk-fonts and wadalab for the fonts.) On Debian-based systems, just grab latex-cjk-all and you should be good. Or if you don’t want the whole package (it’s huge), grab whatever you need for latex-cjk-chinese, latex-cjk-japanese or latex-cjk-korean (and whatever relevant font packages).

Here’s a basic example for Chinese:

\usepackage{CJK}
…
%% if your file is saved as GB simplified encoding
… as we say in Chinese,
\begin{CJK}{GB}{gbsn}子曰：有朋自远方来，不亦乐乎？\end{CJK}

%% if you file is saved as Big5 traditional encoding
… as we say in Chinese,
\begin{CJK}{Bg5}{bsmi}子曰：有朋自遠方來，不亦樂乎？\end{CJK}

But if you’re saving as UTF-8 then you need CJKutf8.sty (included in CJK package):

\usepackage{CJKutf8}
…
as we say in Chinese,
\begin{CJK}{UTF8}{gbsn}子曰：有朋自远方来，不亦乐乎？\end{CJK}
or \begin{CJK}{UTF8}{bsmi}子曰：有朋自遠方來，不亦樂乎？\end{CJK}

You have a few font choices (make sure you get the latex-cjk-chinese-arphic-* files!)

  • gbsn (简体宋体, simplified Chinese)
  • gkai (简体楷体, simplified Chinese )
  • bsmi (繁体细上海宋体, traditional Chinese)
  • bkai (繁体标楷体, traditional Chinese)

Japanese and Korean text are typeset much the same way. If you save everything as UTF-8, then it’s just a matter of knowing what fonts to invoke:

\usepackage{CJKutf8}
…
%% Japanese
\begin{CJK}{UTF8}{min}
露の世は 露の世ながら さりながら
\end{CJK}

%% Korean
\begin{CJK}{UTF8}{mj}
편편황조 자웅상의 염아지독 수기여귀
\end{CJK}

The Japanese fonts are from the wadalab packages (latex-cjk-japanese-wadalab-*):

  • min (明朝 Mincho)
  • goth (ゴシック Gothic)
  • maru (丸ゴシック Maru Gothic)

As for Korean, well I’ve only been able to get mj (明朝体 MyongJu) working so far.

Entire Document in Chinese

On the other hand, if your entire document is going to be in Chinese, you might be better off using the ctexart document class (in the ctex package):

\documentclass[UTF8]{ctexart}

\begin{document}

\section{论语}
子曰：有朋自远方来，不亦乐乎？

\end{document}

There is a caveat, though. You’ll need to copy some Windows Chinese font files to your $localtexmf/fonts/truetype/… directory (don’t forget to run texhash!) to use ctex properly (font name in CJK/ctexart in brackets). These are all for simplified Chinese characters:

  • simsun.ttc 宋体 (song, default)
  • simfant.ttf 仿宋 (fs)
  • simkai.ttf 楷书 (kai)
  • simhei.ttf 黑体 (hei)
  • simli.ttf 隶书 (li)
  • simyou.ttf 幼圆 (you)

In any case, for more help on the ctex package and ctexart.cls, you’d best ask for help at the CTEX forum. (Language there is predominantly Mandarin Chinese.) I’m not aware of similar classes for Japanese nor Korean, though.

Pinyin and Ruby

Younger children learning Chinese characters (Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja) would often have the pronunciations annotated alongside/above/beneath the characters. For Chinese pinyin pronunciations, you would invoke

\usepackage{pinyin}
…\dian4 \deng1

to get diàn dēng.

To cite Martin Duerst:

Ruby are small characters used for annotations of a text, at the right side for vertical text, and atop for horizontal text, to indicate the reading (pronounciation) of ideographic characters.

And you can produce them with the ruby package:

\usepackage{CJKutf8,pinyin}
\usepackage[overlap,CJK]{ruby}
…

%% By convention, the pinyin would be *under* the Hanzi
%% so change the \rubysep to move it under
\begin{CJK}{UTF8}{gbsn}
\renewcommand\rubysep{-1.4em}
\ruby{电}{\dian4}\ruby{灯}{\deng1}
\end{CJK}

%% I find the default \rubysep (-0.5ex) too tight, so
%% let’s enlarge it a little.
\renewcommand\rubysep{-0.2ex}

%% Shonen manga readers would get the written as
%% rival, pronounced as friend reference
%% (CORRECTED June 22)
\begin{CJK}{UTF8}{min}
\ruby{素敵}{ともだち}
\end{CJK}

%% Disclaimer: I’m actually unsure where the
ruby should be placed for Korean Hanja
\begin{CJK}{UTF8}{mj}
\ruby{南}{남}\ruby{宮}{궁}
\end{CJK}

The output of which looks something like this: