Re: [cjk] output with source han and xdvipdfmx

[Hin-Tak Leung]

I am a bit confused about the Adobe Source Han <-> Noto Fonts relationship. I 
think there is a good degree of co-operation, but Adobe and Google both have 
their own little ideas (not least branding and visibility) so the two fonts 
share a lot but not identical.

Some of this thread has gone into a bit of overly technical discussion (which 
you can ignore). Let me try to give a somewhat biased summary of the various 
alternatives of using custom fonts for Latex documents.

1. If you are doing new documents, and do not have a lot of baggages and 
opinion about how Latex *should* work, LuaTeX and XeTeX can both access 
arbitrary platform fonts. I have no experience with LuaTeX; I tried XeTeX, and 
found the change in layout, word-breaks, hyphenations unfamilar. Yes, I think 
even if you stick to Computer Modern Roman, you'll need to learn new ways of 
doing those things. However, if you are writing a new document in LaTeX and 
needs to do a lot of languages or a lot of different fonts, those are the ways 
to go for flexible handling of fonts, and other typographic features of 
non-English.

2. If you have a lot of baggages, i.e. extending an old LaTeX document with new 
paragraphs in a new language/fonts, besides setting up dvips, there are two 
other ways of targeting pdf. pdfTeX and dvipdfmx. So in 2003 I went in that 
direction, and wrote it up, in a file called 
"cjk/doc/pdfhowto/HOWTO.txt" (it is part of the CJK documentation and it should 
be in your hard disk if you are using TexLive), which covers mostly dvipdfmx 
and a bit on pdfTeX also. More below.

2a. The main difference between going through postscript with dvips ->ps2pdf vs 
directly to pdf via pdfTeX/dvipdfmx is graphics. If you need psfrag or any of 
the latex packages which depends on running through ghostscript, then you have 
to use the former. However, the latter has a numbers of advantages: the pdf 
format itself suppports direct embedding of tif, png, gif, and also, pdf itself 
has an object model, so also a pdf page as graphics also, and with that 
transparent graphics as well. A traditional dvips workflow only supports eps as 
graphics, and involves converting all of these into such (and losing 
transparency in png, for example) either explicitly or behind the scene.

2b. There are a number of differences between pdfTeX and dvipdfmx - the former 
has a larger (more English-speaking) community, and the latter was/is run by a 
smaller number of Korean people. One of the explicit goals of the latter is 
preserving text-searchability. i.e. pdf's from dvipdfmx preserves encoding 
information, and you can extract non-english text, cut-and-paste from it (the 
same applies to the modern XeTeX/LuaTeX output also), have its content indexed 
by a Google's search engine, etc. Whereas non-English dvips/ps2pdf and pdfTeX 
generated pdf's loses encoding information and loses the full compatability of 
being indexed by a search-engine.

3. When I wrote "cjk/doc/pdfhowto/HOWTO.txt" in 2003 I mostly wrote for usage 
of typesetting localized text for localized proprietary fonts. Around 2013/2014 
I revisited it (possibly because I had a new computer), most of it had stood 
the text of time and still useful in 2014, but it was still very much 
get-your-hand-dirty and developer-oriented. We discussed a number of upcoming 
changes in TeXLive then - many of the tools were being migrated away from 
FreeType 1 (which had not been updated for nearly 20 years) - which would have 
made life a lot easier; the changes in TeXLive seems to have completed since. 
Things have indeed gone easlier; It is due a re-write, so I guess I should 
update it.

4. So this little thread uncovers another interesting differences between the 
three: dvips needs postscript type 1 fonts; pdfTeX still cannot use the other 
font index in a ttc.

5. I'll like to make all of them work again, so I'll possibly try to get dvips 
and pdfTex to work also; personally I am leaning on dvipdfmx as it lets me use 
the font as is (sharing with platform-viewing) without going whole-sale the 
XeTeX/LuaTeX way. 

--------------------------------------------
On Fri, 2/6/17, Thorsten <address@hidden> wrote:

 Hello Werner, hello Hin-Tak,
 
 I am a bit in a hurry leaving
 for work, so only a few lines:
 
 * "Noto Serif CJK is a rebadged version of
 Source Han Serif" says https
 ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto_fonts, so they
 should be the same I
 thought?
 
 * The Hanazono font is
 japanese, as I try to write Chinese text, I
 would rather like to stay with a Chinese font,
 if possible. And if you
 are right, my
 problem seems to be not missing glyphs in the original
 font, but some mistake in my installation
 process?
 
 * If I look to the
 state of the discussion on the list, I feel like a
 layman listening to a discussion of experts...
 not understanding
 much... ;-))) I only hope,
 that in the end there will be a way I
 understand...
 
 * I am visiting my sister's 25th
 anniversary of her wedding over the
 weekend,
 so I have to apologize, that I am not quite sure, in how far
 I
 manage to do further experiments or
 respond to emails during this
 time...
 
 Thank you for all effort you
 invest into my problem!
 
 Thorsten