Re: "CJKV Information Processing" Table of Contents

From: Ken Lunde (lunde@adobe.com)
Date: Thu Oct 08 1998 - 13:12:11 EDT


Elliotte,

You wrote:

>> I and presumably others would be very interested in hearing war
>> stories of the production of this book. What platform?

MacOS Version 8.1J

>> What software?

Adobe FrameMaker Version 5.5.6 for main composition, along with a
little help from Adobe Illustrator 8.0, Macromedia FreeHand 8.0J,
QuarkXPress 4.02J, and SMI EDICOLOR 2.2.2 (which got turned into EPS
files that were imported into FM).

>> What fonts?

Lots and lots of custom fonts. While the Chinese and Korean fonts that
I used were genuine Chinese and Korean, I re-encoded them according to
Shift-JIS (with CID-keyed font technology, it is a simple matter of
creating a Shift-JIS CMap file) so that MacOS-J thinks that they are
Japanese fonts. This allowed me to stick with a Japanese OS. I
actually describe this approach in my book, and am making these custom
Shift-JIS CMap files available on the book's FTP site.

I also hacked (er, uh, hmm, I mean edited -- at the source level)
versions of the ITC Garamond family for macrons, breves, and other
special characters necessary for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean
transliteration, and also for Vietnamese Quoc ngu.

>> I've included significant non-Roman text in three of my last four
>> books including one for O'Reilly and two for IDG, and it's been a
>> nightmare every time. At least now I know where a few of the mines
>> lay.

I managed to clear all of the landmines in my path. Having full
control over the book helps a lot.

>> For instance, I put a big warning at the front of each file that
>> uses non-Roman characters about opening Word 97/98 files in earlier
>> versions. That warning includes Greek, Cyrrillic, and Icelandic
>> characters and tells peopel that they've got a corrupted file if they
>> don't see those characters. Also I paste in a small screen capture of
>> each paragraph with non-Roman letters just so production can see what
>> it's supposed to look like.

The fact that I also typeset the book (that means I functioned as
author and production editor) helped by giving me full control over
all aspects of layout.

>> Anyway, I would be very curious to hear your experiences, even more
>> so if they can be extended to Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Cyrillic; and
>> I suspect others would like to hear of of them as well.

They probably couldn't be extended to these scripts. The Vietnamese
font hack was nasty, and I wouldn't want to put anyone through the
misery of using the result. The one for Chinese (Pinyin tones),
Japanese (macrons), and Korean (breve) was a bit more slick, and
involved a single set of fonts. But still, it was a hack in the sense
that it followed no standard.

Does that help?

-- Ken



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