EN:Features

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Features Overview

luatex-cn provides a rich set of features for Chinese typesetting, from the core vertical engine and traditional book elements to a clreq-conformant horizontal pipeline.

1. Core Typesetting Engine

A grid-based layout system built on LuaTeX for high-precision vertical text flows.

• RTT Direction: Native support for top-to-bottom, right-to-left direction.
• Grid Positioning: Characters are precisely aligned to a defined grid.
• Pagination & Column Flow: Handles complex page splitting and column transitions automatically.

2. Vertical: Four Document Classes

• guji: Traditional ancient book typesetting with banxin, fishtail, silk frames.
• guji-digital: Digitization mode — one source line is one vertical column, with \双列{\右小列{…}\左小列{…}} for manual interlinear splitting, to reproduce a source edition's page layout exactly.
• cn-vbook / tw-vbook (v0.2.7+): Modern vertical books with clean design, built-in footnotes and punctuation system.

3. Horizontal: \usepackage{luatex-cn}

A modern horizontal Chinese pipeline implementing W3C clreq. It is a package, not a class: load it on top of article or any other horizontal class. Its rule kernel in tex/shared/ is the same implementation the vertical engine uses.

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Source Han Serif SC}[Script=CJK, Language={Chinese Simplified}]
\usepackage[style=taiwan]{luatex-cn}

• CJK–Western spacing: 1/4 em, shrinkable to 1/8 and stretchable to 1/2, with the three clreq exceptions.
• Punctuation width adjustment: mainland / Taiwan / no-adjustment presets, consecutive-punctuation reduction, half-width line-final punctuation, optional hanging punctuation.
• Line breaking: four kinsoku levels (none/basic/gb/strict) plus the symbol-separation prohibition; per-line redistribution in clreq priority order (7 compression levels / 2 stretch levels with an even-spread fallback).
• Interlinear marks and annotations: \专名, \书名号甲, \着重; \拼音 / \对照 word-aligned phonetic guides.
• Paragraphs and pages: two-character first-line indent, orphan-character avoidance, widow/club line control, hanging-indent and indented-paragraph environments, four last-line alignments, and the \字号 traditional size system.
• Quotation-mark conversion: off by default; convertible to curly or corner style automatically or explicitly.

The implementation is verified clause by clause by test/clreq_test.py, which measures the PDF content stream and runs in CI. See Horizontal.

⚠️ Requires LuaTeX and is mutually exclusive with luatexja (which ctex loads under LuaLaTeX).

⚠️ Not yet in a release (latest is v0.3.8) — get it from the main branch.

4. Punctuation Processing

• Punctuation System (v0.2.7+): Modern punct squeeze, kinsoku, vertical quote replacement with mainland/Taiwan styles. Vertical punctuation width adjustment is context-sensitive per clreq, and glyph placement is anchored by measured ink extents rather than the font's own design. On the main branch additionally: hanging punctuation at column end (punct-hanging), CJK-Western spacing (1/4 em, western-space), sideways Western text (\Sideways), and the extended connector/interpunct/solidus classes (mainland interpunct at half width).
• Judou: Traditional punctuation marks with three modes (normal/judou/none) switchable at any time.

5. Traditional Book Elements

Full support for visual elements required by traditional binding:

• Banxin & Yuwei: Support for single/double fishtails, black silk frames, etc.
• Split Page: Support for electronic reading and traditional "tube page" binding.
• Border System: Double borders, inner borders, and customizable thickness.

6. Annotation & Revision System

Multiple ways to add comments to the text:

• Interlinear Notes: Double-line small text within main body with auto-balancing.
• Side Notes: Vertical annotations between text columns.
• Annotations: Floating annotation boxes placed anywhere on the page.
• Marginal Notes (v0.2.3+): Top-of-page annotations.
• Footnotes (v0.2.7+): Endnotes and page-bottom notes with lujiao/circled numbering.
• TOC Entries: \条目 (v0.2.5+) with hierarchical indentation.

7. Layout Control & Commands

• Force Column: \列 (or \Column) forces content to start in a new column.
• Last Column: \末列 (or \LastColumn) places content in the last column.
• Flexible Widths: \行[width=2cm]{...} (v0.2.7+) for variable-width columns.
• Page Breaks: Supports standard \newpage and \clearpage.
• Half-Page Break (v0.3.6+): \NewHalfPage / \换半页 jumps to the next half-page in split-page mode.
• Illustration Page (v0.3.6+): \IllustrationPage / \插图页 hides silk frames while keeping borders, for full-page illustrations (fix #29).
• Natural Layout (v0.2.7+): layout-mode=natural for non-uniform spacing.

8. Decorations & Utilities

• Seals: Add collection or personal seals anywhere with opacity support.
• Fonts: Auto-detection, font families, and fallback chains. Supports simplified/traditional Chinese font names since v0.2.2.
• Textbox: Grid-based layout with auto-compression and filling. Transparency control (v0.3.6+).
• Colophon (v0.3.6+): \colophon / \牌记 — opaque double-border floating text box.
• Correction & Decoration: Correction marks and character decoration.
• Elevation (v0.2.6+): Honorific elevation formatting (single/double/triple/flat).

9. Architecture & Debug Features (v0.2.0+)

• Style Registry: Multi-attribute style storage with cross-page preservation.
• Metadata System: Centralized book metadata management.
• Debug Mode: Grid visualization and layout debugging.
• Layout Export: \enableLayoutExport exports layout results to JSON, including precise character coordinates, page/column/row info, jiazhu and sidenote data.
• Plugin Architecture: Standardized plugin API with three-phase interfaces.

10. Template System

Preset classical styles available out-of-the-box. See Templates.

• 四库全书 (Siku Quanshu): Qing Dynasty imperial style.
• 四库全书彩色: Colored version.
• 红楼梦甲戌本: Manuscript style.
• 中华书局 (v0.2.7+): Modern mainland-style vertical layout.

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👉 Next Steps: Check Templates | Debug Mode | Examples