[Therion] Chinese characters in Therion.

[Duncan Collis]

On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 4:21 AM, Martin Budaj <m.budaj at gmail.com> wrote:
> It should work with the new font setup (you need latest snapshot). You
> just need to set pdf-fonts in therion.ini file (search thbook for
> pdf-fonts keyword) to reference Chinese fonts (you can enter the same
> font name for all styles).

It works !!  I was expecting this to be difficult, but it just works
(on Win32, I'll try on my Linux system later).

However, while all Chinese fonts contain western characters, it' not
unusual for the typography to suck when using western characters from
a Chinese font.  Thus, if I specify that Therion should use a Chinese
font for all typefaces (<rm>, <it>, <bf>, <ss> and <si>), it means
that I will likely get ugly text for things that are in western
script.  Of course, I can mark all Chinese text as, say <rm>, and
specify a Chinese font only for that style, but that means the <rm>
style is no longer available for use for western text.

Ideally I'd like to do something like:

<rm>This is western text in a Roman font <ss>This is western text in a
Sans-Serif font <rm lang=zh>[This is Chinese text in a Song font] <ss
lang=zh>[This is Chinese text in a Hei font]

... and specify fonts per language. Then it could be possible to have
multilingual Therion source files, and to choose the output language
in the thconfig file.

In fact, for a Chinese user (I don't think there are any yet), <rm>,
<it>, <bf>, <ss> and <si> mightn't make a whole lots of sense anyway;
while Hei script is kind of like sans-serif and Song is similarly a
bit like using a serif font, italics and boldface aren't really used
in Chinese.  Probably there are similar issues in other languages.
Maybe it would make more sense (and be more generally applicable) to
specify fonts according to use, ie, label, comment, title, with
variants for emphasis, etc, and allow the user to specify an
appropriate font for each?

Does anyone else use Therion in either a multilingual environment or
with a non-western language?

Duncan.