= LaTeX Encoding =

LaTeX fundamentally works with three text encodings:

 1. The input encoding, used to interpret the files that are supplied to LaTeX and TeX
 2. The internal character representation, used within the programs
 3. The font encoding, used to translate bytes into glyphs

Most reasonable users of LaTeX are only interested in the third item.

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== A Great Big Caveat ==

LuaTeX and XeTeX are fantastic projects that are taking the world of TeX and LaTeX forwards into the future. Both run natively in Unicode, and both are built on top of modern libraries like Harfbuzz (i.e. automatically poll system fonts for glyphs). If you have the flexibility, consider ''not using LaTeX''.

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== CJK ==

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean occupy a closely related segment of the Unicode universe, and so are commonly bunched together in distributed software. Used only by a niche community, there's often only ''one'' good way of handling CJK text in LaTeX.



=== Quick Start ===

{{{
\usepackage{CJKutf8}

% ...

This is some `normal' text, while \begin{CJK}{UTF8}{min}これは悪魔のもの\end{CJK}.

}}}



=== CJK Fonts ===

The `latex-cjk-japanese-wadalab` package distributes three fonts for use as above: `min` (Mincho, roughly equivalent to serif, lit. "Ming dynasty"), `goth` (Gothic, roughly equivalent to sans-serif), and `maru` (rounded, lit. "circle").

The most available Chinese fonts are `gbsn` or `gkai` for Simplified Chinese, and `bsmi` or `bkai` for Traditional Chinese.



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CategoryRicottone