[Scribus] How is the support for CJK users?

[Zhang Weiwu]

Plinnell wrote:

>On Wednesday 01 September 2004 04:18, Zhang Weiwu wrote:
>  
>
>>I can correctly place CJK characters onto story editor. But I
>>experienced several crash when doing things like exporting PDF format,
>>when my document contains CJK characters.
>>
>>CJK means Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Is there any effort put into
>>this area? Are we planning to add Asian typography in the near future?
>>    
>>
>
>Which version of Scribus ? Which distro and library versions?
>  
>
I have problems in both 1.1.7 and 1.2 (just upgraded). I have two boxes 
runing FreeBSD 4.10 and Gentoo Linux. One of the problems are that 
certain file make scribus (both versions) "crash with signal #6" (that's 
what the pop-up windows says). However I lost the files which made the 
crash, otherwise I already filed a bug. I cannot say for sure the crash 
is due to CJK characters.

>We have had one user who used Scribus to create packaging in Chinese and he 
>indicated no real difficulties or crashes with CJK. He said it was easier to 
>do this in Scribus than in other apps. There is a screen shot of that file 
>here: http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&sm=printing&page=print2
>  
>

Nice screenshot!

>I have a copy of that file which works fine in 1.2. I just tested importing 
>and exporting UTF-8 text from the story editor, as well as exporting PDF 
>without problems.  The PDF displays and prints perfectly from Acro Reader 
>5.09
>
>CJK is not officially supported yet, as CJK input methods have not been 
>installed. 
>
This is not a problem! CJK input method is done on QT level, so 
currently people don't have difficulty typing CJK in scribus.

>However, a great deal of work will be put into the 1.3 series to 
>extend language and script support for non-Latin scripts.
>
>None of the current devels has any real knowledge of CJK, so any help there 
>would be most welcome. 
>

I am working with Arne Goetje, a nice German guy living in taiwan, 
maintain/expending two font sets (CJK-Unifonts) for CJK users. And as 
far as both of us know, the fonts we are working on is the only 
opensource fontset which contains both Simplified Chinese, Traditional 
Chinese and some Japanese. I hope we can talk about it in more detail 
later, perhaps we could possibily add more CJK typography into scribus 
in the future, and it's much better we the font maintainer work closely 
with you. However I am not a C programmer, and I don't have enough 
knowledge / time to work directly on scribus. If you think it's okay we 
can possibily compose some Asian typography implementation guide 
specific for scribus to work easier on CJK. There are small things 
future scribus need to take care of, like how to manage spaces between 
CJK characters, where to place symbols and when to shrink them. However 
it's just an idea.

And you must have considered many difficulties I heard many DTP projects 
must fight with, like right-to-left and top-to-bottom arrangement. I 
hope scribus become a famouse international product in a few years:)