April 1994
Intermediate to advanced
522 pages
9h 12m
English
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Chapter 7. International Considerations
Although the standard TeX macro packages and the Computer Modern fonts were designed to typeset documents written primarily in English, TeX enjoys widespread international use.
From a technical standpoint, languages can be divided into two categories: those that are “like English” (meaning that they use a relatively small number of characters and are typeset horizontally, left to right) and those that are not. German, French, and Russian are all “like English” in this sense. Hebrew, Chinese, and Japanese are not (Hebrew is typeset right to left, and Chinese and Japanese use thousands of characters).[85]
This chapter explores some of the issues that arise when TeX is used to typeset languages other than English. For simplicity, we'll look at languages like English first, and then describe some environments for typesetting much more complex languages.
Typesetting in Any Language
In order to typeset any language with TeX, three things have to happen:
- TeX has to read the input file and perform the correct mapping from the input file's character set to its internal representation of each character. The character set used in the input file will vary depending upon the language. For instance, if you're writing a document in French, it is as natural to use “é” in your input file as it is to use any other letter.
- TeX has to typeset the document according to the rules of the language being used. Naturally, this means that there must be some way of ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.