[Scribus] How is the support for CJK users?

[Plinnell]

Hi,

See me comments in-line please.
On Wednesday 01 September 2004 08:59, Zhang Weiwu wrote:
> 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.

If you can replicate it, please do submit a bug with the file. 
>
> >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.

Great.
>
> >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. 

Certainly. Also, please do feel free to join #scribus on irc.freenode.net. It 
is most lively during evenings Europe time.  

>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.
>
Scribus and Qt are c++
> 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:)

Yes, text handling is one of the most complicated issues. But, I think a lot 
of progress has been made already. For one, Scribus supports Open Type Fonts 
very well, including exporting them into PDF.

Cheers,
Peter