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In 20th century Chinese typography, within transliterated proper nouns and between the name of a book and its sections, a sort of centered bullet is sometimes used (see illustration). This symbol is of regular "ideographic" proportions, meaning that although it is small, it takes up the same amount of space as a normal Chinese character in a monowidth CJK font.

It seems the symbol HYPHENATION POINT (U+2027) used in many of the texts on the Academia Sinica site is not suitable for application here, and various other Unicode bullets and dots (U+2022, U+2219, U+30fb, etc.) are also unsuitable. Is there a recommended way to achieve this effect in xeCJK?

I am typesetting Chinese text in columns using everypage:

\usepackage{xeCJK}
\setromanfont[Scale=.9,Mapping=tex-text]{TeX Gyre Termes}
\newfontlanguage{Chinese}{CHN}
\setCJKmainfont[Script=CJK,Language=Chinese,Vertical=RotatedGlyphs]{SimSun}
\setCJKfallbackfamilyfont{rm}{MingLiU-ExtB}

\usepackage{everypage}
\AddEverypageHook{\CJKmove\special{pdf: put @thispage <</Rotate 90>>}}

as described at https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/16263/3935.

Illustration: fifth discrete glyph from the top, from a 1989 Shanghai edition.

Monowidth hyphenation point or bullet for Chinese texts,

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brannerchinese
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1 Answers1

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I think the Middle Dot ·(U+00B7) is the right symbol.

In most Simplified Chinese input method softwares, you can press @ on the standard keyboard to get the symbol. And what's more, most fonts designed for Simplified Chinese use this symbol as 间隔号.

In Taiwan, ‧ (U+2027) is used instead, so you can use

\xeCJKDeclareCharClass{CJK}{"2027 -> "2027}

or

\xeCJKDeclareCharClass{FullRight}{"2027 -> "2027}

However, fonts for Simplified Chinese don't usually have this symbol. You must specify a proper font (usually in Taiwan), not SimSun. I think MingLiU and Microsoft JhengHei are fine.

I'm thinking about set U+2027 as a CJK punctuation by default, in later version of xeCJK.

BTW, in xunicode, \textcentereddot and \textperiodcentered are defined to typeset · (U+00B7). However, xeCJK has a special treatment for these symbols. When you use · directly, you get a CJK punctuation (in CJK fonts), but when you use \textcentereddot or \textperiodcentered, you get the same symbol in western fonts.

Leo Liu
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