PTEX(1)

📦
version 77830 · 6 versions
, in alpine 3.24, debian trixie, fedora 44, opensuse-leap 16.0, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute

💖 PTEX(1) 💖

okay bestie, grab your strawberry matcha because today we're learning about ptex, uptex, eptex, and euptex — aka the Japanese "Publishing TeX" girlies. this page lives in the General Commands Manual section and it's giving "I can typeset your whole novel in Japanese, no cap". 🎀

✨ NAME ✨

ptex, uptex, eptex, euptex — Japanese "Publishing TeX". 👑

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

ptex [options] [&format] [file|\commands]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so, pTeX (ptex) is a TeX engine with extensions for Japanese typesetting — think line breaking rules, inter-character spacing, and vertical writing. it was first developed by ASCII Corporation, and the whole goal was literally to give the world a Japanese TeX that could be used for commercial publishing. main character energy fr fr. 📚✨

heads up though: for pTeX, the character set available is limited to JIS X 0208, namely JIS level-1 and level-2. that's the whole vibe check, no extras.

upTeX (uptex) is a Unicode-enabled pTeX with extensions for better handling of CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) multilingual documents. it's been developed by Takuji Tanaka since 2007. 💅

e-pTeX (eptex) is a merge of e-TeX and pTeX. 🫶

e-upTeX (euptex) is a merge of e-TeX and upTeX. 🌈

in the following sections, we refer to these engines as (e-)(u)pTeX. iykyk.

also, (e-)(u)pTeX's handling of its command-line arguments is similar to that of the other TeX programs in the web2c implementation. so if you already know TeX, you're lowkey already home. 🏠

💅 OPTIONS 💅

okay so here we're listing only the additions/deletions of command line options which are specific to (e-)(u)pTeX. for (u)pTeX, other options are similar to TeX. for e-(u)pTeX, other options are similar to e-TeX. don't come for me about the missing ones, they're literally just TeX's. 😌

🍓 Additions (supported by ptexenc library)

  • -kanji string — sets the input Japanese Kanji code. the string can be either euc (EUC-JP), jis (ISO-2022-JP), sjis (Shift_JIS), and utf8 (UTF-8). for (e-)upTeX, uptex is also allowed. 🌸
  • -kanji-internal string — sets the internal Kanji code. the string can be either euc, and sjis. for (e-)upTeX, uptex is also allowed. ✨

💀 Deletions

  • -enc — in this version of (e-)(u)pTeX, encTeX extensions are not available. that option said "not me, not today" and left the group chat. 🙈

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

🫶 AUTHORS 🫶

this version of (e-)(u)pTeX is maintained by Japanese TeX Development Community <https://texjp.org>. for bug reports, open an issue at GitHub repository <https://github.com/texjporg/tex-jp-build>, or send an e-mail to <issue@texjp.org>. they're responsive, they're sweet, they want your bug reports. 💖

this manual page was written by Hironobu Yamashita. absolute icon, we love to see it. 👑

okay that's the whole page bestie!! this was Web2C 2025, dated 08 August 2021 — go forth and typeset something gorgeous in Japanese, you've got this. mwah. 💋✨

📦 where this page comes from