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Chapter 7: MIF Asian Text Processing
Statements
This chapter describes the MIF statements used to express Asian text in a document. It includes character encoding
statements, combined Asian and Western fonts, Kumihan tables, and rubi text.
Asian Character Encoding
Western text in a MIF file is written out as 7-bit ASCII. However, 7-bit encoding is insufficient for Asian text. Asian
text in MIF files is represented by double-byte encoding. There are different encoding schemes for each supported
language, and the MIF file must include a statement that can be used to determine which encoding to use.
The MIF file can be edited with an Asian-enabled text editor on the platform on which the MIF was written. If the
text in a MIF file is in more than one Asian language, then only the language of the MIF encoding statement will be
directly readable in a text editor. All other non 7-bit ASCII text will be backslashed escaped using the MIF backslash
x convention.
MIFEncoding statement for Japanese
Adobe® FrameMaker® recognizes two encoding schemes for Japanese; Shift-JIS and EUC. The Windows versions of
FrameMaker write Shift-JIS for Japanese text, and the UNIX versions of FrameMaker write out EUC. The MIF can
converted between Shift-JIS and EUC using a Japanese text conversion utility. The MIF encoding statement is
converted along with the text in the MIF file.
To determine which encoding was used, each MIF file that contains Japanese text must include a
MIFEncoding
statement near the beginning of the file. It must appear before any Japanese text in the file. The string value in the
MIFEncoding
statement is the Japanese spelling of the word “Nihongo,” which means Japanese. FrameMaker reads
this fixed string and determines what the encoding is for it. From that, FrameMaker expects the same encoding to
be used for all subsequent 8-bit text in the document.
To see the characters spelling the word Nihongo, you must view the MIF file on a system that is enabled for Japanese
character display. When the MIF is displayed on a Roman system, the characters appear garbled.
Syntax
<MIFEncoding `
‘> # originally written as Japanese (Shift-JIS)
<MIFEncoding `
‘> # originally written as Japanese (EUC)
MIFEncoding statement for Chinese
FrameMaker recognizes three encoding schemes for Chinese; Big5 and CNS for Traditional Chinese, and GB2312-
80 for Simplified Chinese. The Windows versions of FrameMaker write Big5 for Traditional Chinese text, and the
UNIX versions of FrameMaker write out CNS for Traditional Chinese text. All platform versions of FrameMaker
write GB2312-80 for Simplified Chinese.