[Tex/LaTex] Mixing Chinese Characters with English (Main Language) in 2019 | What is the “State of the Art”

chinesecjkfonts

I have a English document (in UTF8) and want to place in some placed Chinese translations (single words: symbols and pinyin, which is the Latin character version).
Ideally, I want to use pdflatex (or lualatex) if that is possible.
What is the start of the art / best practice for including (little) Chinese text bits in a mainly English document using pdflatex or lualatex?
I am looking for a robust solution that may be feasible for some years.
I am also open if you recommend not to do that if this a not well supported use case for LaTeX.

This is a made-up MWE 🙂 (I just Googled the translations).

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

This is an English text about apples 
(Chinese simplified/traditional: 
\SimplifiedChineseCharacter{苹} / \TraditionalChineseCharacter{蘋} 
(Pinyin: \Pinying{píng guǒ}))

\end{document}

The question may be to broad or even stupid – this is mainly due to my inexperience in this area. I am looking for some advice and some MWEs to start with.

How does one type Chinese in LaTeX? (from 2011)
https://www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/2jyuqt/how_do_you_include_a_couple_chinese_characters_in/ (from 2015)
https://ctan.org/pkg/cjk (from 2015)
This user seems to be very active in the past: https://tex.stackexchange.com/users/2674/leo-liu, but There is now activity after mid of 2017.
Pinyin to character (from 2018, mixing pinyin and Chinese characters, looks very cool)
https://ctan.org/pkg/notocjksc: Famous noto fonts by Google and Adobe, see Multiple xeCJK fonts and LaTeX, CJK and Chinese gives missing font file cyberb65 for example.
Typographical discussion about pinyin (in German): https://thetype.com/2017/08/11606/#pinyin-size

Update 1: Follow-up Question

babel: Language "pinyin"

Update 2: fontspec vs. babelfont

I have noticed that David did not use fontspec in his answer – I am not an expert in fonts but I usually see fontspec when using luatex. I found the explanation in the babel manual:

Best Answer

Here's a babel implementation showing English (australian) as main language, simplified and traditional Chinese, and Pinyin.

It will compile with XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX. Though be aware that the Chinese fonts are huge and it takes the LuaTeX font loader a long time and a lot of RAM to build the cache. So long, that I can't actually compile this on my computer with LuaLaTeX. (I have a 5 year old MacBook Air with 4GB RAM running Linux. My machine just runs out of resources and kills the process.)

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[pinyin,australian]{babel}

\babelprovide[main,import,language=Default]{australian}
\babelprovide[import,language=Chinese Simplified]{chinese-simplified}
\babelprovide[import,language=Chinese Traditional]{chinese-traditional}

\babelfont{rm}{Noto Serif}
\babelfont{sf}{Noto Sans}
\babelfont[chinese-simplified]{rm}{Noto Serif CJK SC}
\babelfont[chinese-simplified]{sf}{Noto Sans CJK SC}
\babelfont[chinese-traditional]{rm}{Noto Serif CJK TC}
\babelfont[chinese-traditional]{sf}{Noto Sans CJK TC}

\begin{document}

\section{Roman Family}

Australian English.    

\foreignlanguage{chinese-simplified}{汉语。}
\foreignlanguage{chinese-traditional}{漢語。}
\foreignlanguage{pinyin}{Pīnyīn.}
\renewcommand*{\familydefault}{\sfdefault}
\sffamily

\section{Sans Serif Family}

Australian English.

\foreignlanguage{chinese-simplified}{汉语。}
\foreignlanguage{chinese-traditional}{漢語。}
\foreignlanguage{pinyin}{Pīnyīn.}

\end{document}

I have a feeling the language= settings shouldn't be needed, but at least with my version of babel, they still are. In the future, I'd guess that this will work without explicitly specifying the language.

XeLaTeX output

Notice the difference in how the Chinese full stop is rendered in simplified and traditional Chinese.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] MiKTeX 2.9 CJK Korean font not found error

The key to the problem is that, when you use CJK package, you must specify the input encoding and the CJK font family, either using CJK environment or using \CJKencoding, \CJKfamily commands; and you must make sure that you have installed the fonts. (CJK fonts are not always fully installed.)

The different TeX distributions have different CJK fonts installed.

In MiKTeX (as you use), cjk-fonts package myoungjo Type1 fonts but there seems no .tfm files and LaTeX font definition (.fd) files to support these files. I can't make any working example without modifying the files, sorry.

In TeX Live, with UTF-8 encoding and uhc font package installed, there is only mj font family available for Korean. (While gbsn, gbsn for Chinese and bsmi, bkai for Japanese.)

Here is an example using UTF8 input encoding (differernt from KS as you used):

% UTF-8 encoding, compile with pdflatex / latex+dvips / latex+dvipdfmx, TeX Live 2012
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{CJK}
\begin{document}
The following should be in Korean
\begin{CJK}{UTF8}{mj}
안녕하세요
\end{CJK}
The previous should be in Korean
\end{document}

If you use KS input encoding (standard KS X 1001:1992, KS C 5601-1992, see document CJK.txt), there are more fonts available, but you may have to install the hlatex-fonts package manually. It is an advanced topic for most users, I won't explain too much here.

There are few English documents about CJK package and other package supporing CJK scripts, but you may access the TeX groups/forums/sites in China, Japan or Korea to get more information.

I am a Chinese, thus I know very little about native Korean font support in LaTeX. Maybe you can search about HLaTeX. And I know the Korean TeX User Group (KTUG) has their own modified TeX Live distribution with much more Korean fonts pre-installed, and there is HLaTeX. (We Chinese do this too.) You may think about installing these TeX distributions.

As an alternative, you may consider using XeLaTeX with our xeCJK package. An example:

% UTF-8 encoding, compile with xelatex, TeX Live 2012
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[space]{xeCJK} % space option is useful for Korean
\setCJKmainfont{Batang}   % a Windows font
\begin{document}
The following should be in Korean
안녕하세요
The previous should be in Korean
\end{document}

Note: xeCJK is originally designed for Chinese, but also support Japanese and Korean (we hope it will be better). There is indeed a native Korean XeTeX package xetexko, available on KTUG, but I know nothing about it.

[Tex/LaTex] xelatex use noto sans cjk produce wrong font, all reduce to jp version

From the Noto Sans CJK website you mentioned https://www.google.com/get/noto/help/cjk/

Noto Sans CJK fonts come in four packaging formats. Glyph designs are identical regardless of the packaging format.

Despite it is not clear why Noto San CJK JP is loaded under xetex mode, you can try to specify the option Language explicitly to get correct glyphs.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[no-math]{fontspec}
\begin{document}
\LARGE
{
\fontspec{Noto Sans CJK SC}
我是 Noto Sans CJK SC

我能吞下玻璃而不伤身体。
}

{
\fontspec{Noto Sans CJK SC}[Language=Japanese]
我是 Noto Sans CJK SC,  jan

我能吞下玻璃而不伤身体。
}

{
\fontspec{Noto Sans CJK SC}[Language={Chinese Simplified}]
我是 Noto Sans CJK SC, zhs

我能吞下玻璃而不伤身体。
}

{
\fontspec{Source Han Sans SC Regular}
我是 Source Han Sans SC Regular

我能吞下玻璃而不伤身体。

简体中文测试。
}

\end{document}

The last one is Source Han Sans SC, an alias of Noto Sans CJK SC named by Adobe and is tested here as a benchmark. You can be downloaded from github.

Compare the difference among these fonts with/without option Language, e.g. the effects of character 能.

See the document of fontspec for details of Language option (section 10.18 and 28.0.22).