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I've seen this discussion about the best IDEs for LaTeX on Ubuntu: XEmacs/AucTeX is recommended by my colleagues off of this site. However, I'm interested in the specific case of mixed CJK/Roman editing with XeLaTeX on Ubuntu. Is there a recommended editor or IDE?

I presently use TeXShop on Mac OS X instead of LyX (which was most widely recommended to me when I started) because I have had trouble getting CJK to work with LyX. Before I start trying out different editors on Ubuntu, I'd be most grateful to hear recommendations or warnings based on other people's experience.

Edit: Caramdir refers me to this discussion. That makes me wonder whether, in practice, every LaTeX editor also supports XeLaTeX perfectly.

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brannerchinese
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  • There is a lot of information at http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/339/latex-editors-ides/411#411. All Linux editors mentioned there should support Unicode. I don't know about RTL text support though. – Caramdir Apr 24 '11 at 19:25
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    Also, do not use the TeX Live packages from Ubuntu. They are outdated (Ubuntu 11.04 still has TL 2009). Install TeX Live from http://tug.org/texlive/. – Caramdir Apr 24 '11 at 19:27
  • @Caramdir: Thanks. RTL is not an issue for me, but sometimes "Unicode support" does not take surrogate pairs into consideration, and there are many in the CJK scripts. – brannerchinese Apr 24 '11 at 21:43
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    Not all LaTeX editors supports XeLaTeX perfectly. For example, WinEdt has very limited (fake) Unicode support: it uses ANSI internally, one have to use Chinese locale settting to get it work with Chinese; WinEdt also cannot wrap CJK symbols properly. Some older editors even does not support CJK characters at all, and many of them have some issues, more or less. – Leo Liu Apr 25 '11 at 13:46

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As I know, TeXworks, (g)VIM, Emacs, gedit, SciTE, TeXmaker,... , all work fine with CJK.

I usually use TeXworks and gVIM on both Windows and Linux. Just set UTF-8 encoding as default, everything will be fine.

However, I always use Chinese version (locale) of Windows/Linux. You might meet some font problem.

In VIM, you should at least set proper guifontwide in .vimrc. Moreover, you may also need to set encoding, fileencodings, ambiwidth and formatoptions.

In TeXworks, one cannot set different font for wide and non-wide charcters. Be sure that the font you set support CJK symbols. And you'd also set UTF-8 encoding.

Things are similar when using other editors.

For Ubuntu, you'd install poppler-data to display CJK glyphs in some PDF files in Evince.

As Caramdir already pointed out, don't use texlive package through apt-get. You'd better use full TeX Live from TUG. xeCJK with XeLaTeX is recommended.

Leo Liu
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