Omega-J: Japanese support for the Omega typesetting system

Installation Guide

by Matt Gushee
mgushee@havenrock.com

October 26, 1999: v0.0001

Contents

• Warning -- please read carefully!
• Overview
• Requirements
• Contents of this package
• Input translation process
• Fonts
• Testing

Warning

Overview

Omega is an internationalized version of the TeX typesetting system. Although TeX gives excellent results in typesetting English and Western European languages, it is poorly suited to languages with large character sets (such as Japanese) and those with very complex typesetting rules (such as Arabic). Omega uses Unicode as its base character set, accommodating (theoretically) all modern writing systems. It uses external modules called Omega Translation Processes (OTPs or, in their compiled form, OCPs) to convert characters from one encoding to another, provide typesetting rules, and otherwise extend the program's capabilities. Omega-J is an effort to provide Japanese language support for Omega. It consists of one or more OTPs, some test documents, and data files and scripts to help you prepare fonts. It is in a very early stage of development, and I am making it available for testing purposes only. Current capabilities are:

• You can process a test document in ISO-2022-JP encoding. The correct kanji will appear in the correct order in the resulting DVI file; ASCII/JIS-Roman characters may or may not appear, depending on the construction of the source file.

You need not be an Omega expert to use this package, but you should at least be familiar with TeX. For more info about TeX and Omega, visit the TeX Users' Group website.

Requirements

Operating system:

The instructions and data files provided here should work for any platform that supports TeX and has long filenames. That includes Windows 95/98/NT, MacOS, OS/2, and most or all flavors of UNIX. It has only been tested on Linux, however. Please let me know if you have trouble on another platform.

Software packages:

TeX

If you need any explanation about TeX, I don't encourage you to try Omega-J in its current state.

Omega

Recent TeX distributions such as teTeX 1.0 include Omega, so you may already have it installed. If not, you can obtain it from your nearest CTAN archive. For a partial list of CTAN sites, see http://www.tug.org/ .

Freetype

An open source Truetype font rendering library. For more info, visit the Freetype Project. Please pay attention to the legalistic warnings.

ttf2tfm & ttf2pk

If you use a TrueType font as per these instructions, you need ttf2tfm to prepare font metric files and ttf2pk to generate bitmap fonts for the output documents. These two programs are part of the Freetype project, but are not normally included in binary distributions. So you'll probably need to obtain the Freetype source code and compile these tools yourself.

Contents of this package

Input translation process

Currently this package provides one OTP file, injis.otp, which converts ISO-2022-JP text to Unicode for input to Omega. It is not yet fully functional, but gives correct results for JISX-0208 kanji. If you use a Unicode-indexed font (such as the virtual font described in the Fonts section), you should obtain the correct characters in your DVI output without using another OTP for output translation.

In order to make this package useful, another OTP will be needed to implement line-breaking rules.