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It was used exactly for that application. Not that long ago, typesetting math formulas was extremely expensive, unless you used TeX. It was not very commercial
by cracrecry 4y ago
It was used exactly for that application.
Not that long ago, typesetting math formulas was extremely expensive, unless you used TeX. It was not very commercial and companies were not interested but certain individuals were.
The same happened when you wanted your Hebrew or Arabic or Japanese just to look right. Japanese uses at least four scripts plus latin words in the same place.
Over time, commercial entities added support for those, most of them just incorporating TeX source code (as it was public domain). They added the visual interfaces and the easiness of use that TeX lacks.
- hnfong 4y ago> Japanese uses at least four scripts Which four? I can only count to 3. My understanding is that all the characters are "fixed width", even the Latin ones. I imagine that makes typesetting easier, and presumably doesn't require the complexity of the Knuth algorithm.
- kccqzy 4y agoKanji, katakana, hiragana, Arabic numerals, Latin text, and punctuation. It depends on the quality of the typesetting and the formality, but you can expect the Arabic numerals, Latin text and punctuations to have different widths than the rest. Of course it's acceptable to make everything full-width, just like in English.
- astrange 4y agoJapanese text is often set not fixed-width in real life. If it includes non-CJK characters like Latin text and punctuation that may be proportional in a font that matches the other text, for instance. And when you’re not talking about a book, but an ad or something like that, it’s common to have a bunch of different text sizes or make some of the words in a sentence bigger to emphasize them.