CJK

Introduction

One reason for the global success of 3B2 is its excellent support for foreign and extended character sets. The CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) market presents some of the most challenging and demanding publishing requirements in the world. As a result of the adaptability of 3B2 and the adoption of the Unicode Standard, Advent is able to provide solutions for complex CJK publications and help companies to produce intricate and large volume publications such as technical manuals and manufacturing documentation in CJK.

3B2 to follow the Unicode Standard

In order to tackle the problems encountered in handling the Japanese language, 3B2 is fully Unicode compliant. Very few systems provide a complete solution to this fundamental publishing problem for some of the world's most technical nations.

3B2 is among the first of high end publishing systems to offer worldwide language support and standards conformance.

George Punton, CEO of the Advent group said:

"Very few developers of publishing software have attempted to handle CJK composition because of the complexity. With up to 40,000 distinct character glyphs used in Chinese and Japanese and with the languages reading from left to right, top to bottom or both, together with the complex typographical requirements of Japanese including the handling of Hiragana, Katakana and Ruby, it presents huge difficulties for typesetting systems. With the flexibility of 3B2, Advent can address all of the requirements and gain a foothold in the CJK market with this outstanding product. Since 1991, 3B2 has supported over 40 languages including non Latin writing systems such as Hebrew and Arabic."

Advent partners with Altech

In order to develop 3B2 further for the CJK publishing market, Advent has entered into a partnership agreement with the Japanese pre-press and printing systems company, Altech www.altech.co.jp based in Tokyo. The Advent/Altech alliance will, for the first time, provide the huge CJK speaking community with a true multi lingual publishing product.

CJK Features

Vertical mode (primarily for CJK): 3B2 has a vertical mode for setting text vertically, particularly in respect of Chinese, Japanese and Korean text.
Yakumono: Yakumono is the name for a class of characters in Japanese which includes brackets, punctuation and other symbols. These characters have the option of being set half width or full width when used in text. 3B2 offers the option to shrink the full width versions of these characters to half their width where appropriate. This includes options to do this when the characters occur at the start of a line, mid-line or at the end of a line.
Ruby annotations: Ruby is the term used for a run of text that is associated with another run of text, referred to as the 'base' text. Ruby text is used to provide a short annotation of the associated base text. Ruby annotations are typically used in East Asian documents to indicate pronunciation or to provide a short annotation. They are frequently used in Japan in many kinds of publications, including books and magazines. Ruby is also used in China, especially in schoolbooks.
Japanese interface version: There is now a Japanese interface version of 3B2.