New CTAN package: MnTTeX- Tools for Typesetting the Secret History of the Mongols

[CTAN Announcements]

On Tue, 21 Dec 2004 Oliver Corff submitted his new package

  MNTTeX

to CTAN.

Name of contribution: MnTTeX- Tools for Typesetting the Secret History of the Mongols
Author's name: Oliver Corff
Location on CTAN: /language/mongolian/MNT
Summary description: The Package assists in typing the special Chinese characters used in the
                     Secret History of the Mongols
License type: lppl

Announcement text:
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The Secret History of the Mongols (Monggol-un niguca tobciyan -> MNT) is
the oldest work of Mongolian literature surviving today.  Though the
language of the text is Middle Mongolian, the text was written entirely in
Chinese characters which were used to render Mongolian phonetically.

Modern tools for typing, editing and typesetting Chinese do not easily
lend themselves for preparing research documentation due to pecularities
of the historical source.

The MNTTeX package assists the scholar typesetting the complex Chinese
material by accessing all characters either by number or pronounciation as
well as offering convenient access to small or combined characters.

The MNTTeX package relies on an existing environment for processing
Chinese characters and assumes that the package CJK is installed.
Furthermore it is required to use the font zysong.ttf or a similar font in
Song style.Since not all characters used in the MNT are provided by modern
fonts they had to be made for this package. Being closely modelled
according to Song style, these especially made characters would stand out
in stark contrast from e.g. Kaiti style character sets. Limited in number,
these individual characters were coded as scalable vector images, rather
than as font. No difference between these characters and ordinary
characters can be perceived in print even though the on-screen display may
appear hardly intelligible.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks for the upload.

For the CTAN Team
  Rainer Schöpf