[NTG-context] MKIV Chinese and English typesetting

[Yue Wang]

> Dear Hans and other friends:
>
>  I am a Chinese user of ConTeXt. Recently, I tried ConTeXt MkIV and
>  test its Chinese  typesetting. I am very glad to see MkIV can access
>  my linux OS TTF&OTF fonts and give a good face of my article about
>  lines breaking. But on the bilingual typesetting, such as Chinese
>  sentences and English words appearance in a article at the same time ,
>  I found there are no good methods to solve the  problem of  setting
>  fonts for them respectively. Now I had to handle it in this way:
>


Well, I am aware of that problem (I think Hans is aware of that
too....). See the relative thread in mailing list archive (Jan 2008, I
think). I mentioned the problem again in another mail to Hans this
morning because more messages like this appeared on Chinese TeX
related web forums these days (It's a good thing, more Chinese TeX
Gurus love to play ConTeXt and LuaTeX ^_^).

There are many ways to deal with that problem. in fact, add your \en
macro into the method.hani() function of  font-otf.lua is a quick and
dirty hack. But I think there should be other more elegant ways to
deal with it. perhaps:
- assign an "english font" feature to "\definefontfeature" or
"\definefontsynonym". When define a CJK typefaces, the corresponding
English typeface can be defined by the user. switch to another font
when needed (using the similar method as in font-otf.lua).
- map the CJK part of a Chinese typeface and Latin part of a English
typeface to one single virtual font, Use this virtual font for
typesetting.

Both of them are not hard to do technically compared what had been
done before.  So maybe we should wake Hans up to continue the CJK
support? Zhichu Chen and I are eager to help whenever a localization
problem is occurred.

Yue Wang