I’ve been studying documentation formats for many months now, and although I generally like ReStructuredText, I’m not convinced that it is quite Japanese-friendly enough. This may be the fault of out of date conversion tools or the like perhaps, but making tables with special symbols seems to be especially awkward (for example, maru, sankaku and batsu: ○, △, ×)

Anyway, I’ve been looking into pTeX and TeXinfo, if not just plain pTeX, and doing so has led me to ptexlive 2009.

For people who just want a Japanese-compatible TeX, Ubuntu Lucid does provide ptex-base and ptex-bin. These, combined with the necessary other Japanese Postscript packages and the like, are likely adequate for most. However, I wanted to try something more modern, and this seems to be the cutting edge.

So, here’s the basic lowdown on how this went:

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