ASCII Co. was founded by Mr. Nishi Kazuhiko, Mr. Tsukamoto, and Mr. Gunji.
This company works in the software and publishing field. So ASCII was
interested in the TeX system. They developed "ASCII Nihongo TeX" in
cooperation with a group of the Keio University in 1987. ASCII Nihongo TeX
is freeware. ASCII Co. implemented this system on MS-DOS in 1989 and sold
it. ASCII Co. added the capability of vertical typesetting to Nihongo TeX---
this is called the p version or pTeX (publishing TeX).

ASCII translated some important books into the Japanese language. These
books are of course typesetted with Nihongo TeX.

   "The TeX book", "The Metafont book"              Knuth.

   "LaTeX: A Document Preparation System"           Lamport.

Many articles about TeX appear in the "UNIX magazine" published monthly by
ASCII.


Some features of Nihongo TeX:

   1. The dvi file format is different from the original TeX's dvi file
      format. (NTT-JTeX's dvi file format is the same as original one. So we
      can use NTT-JTeX's dviware for the CJK package.)

   2. Nihongo TeX is not only capable of using TeX Font Metric files (tfm),
      but can also use Japanese Font Metric files (jfm). The jfm file format
      is defined as an extension of the tfm file format for Nihongo TeX. One
      jfm file has about 7000 kanji character metrics and kerning
      informations to cover entire JIS fonts (and thus avoiding subfonts).
      [See shibuaki.txt for some details about space handling between
      Japanese and ASCII characters.]

   3. Characters can be printed vertically.


In 1992 Tsukamoto and Gunji retired from ASCII Co. and founded Impress Co.,
and some engineers specialized on TeX moved from ASCII to Impress.

Impress Co. works in same field as ASCII Co., namely software and
publishing. In 1994 Impress made and sold "TeX for Windows" based on an
older version of ASCII Nihongo TeX (a modified TeX version 2.99). This
system runs on Windows 3.1, Windows 95 or Windows NT and has been sold to
many PC users. Literature is also available for "TeX for Windows". 

A major drawback of this system is that it is not yet based on TeX 3 and
thus cannot fully support LaTeX2e or multilingual issues.


In November 1995 ASCII announced the latest version of Nihongo TeX (pTeX
2.1.1) which is based on TeX 3.1415; this package also contains a format
file of LaTeX2e <1995/06/01>.

At the time of this writing (1996/02/09) ASCII Nihongo TeX's version is pTeX
2.1.4 .


Version 1.0 Beta2 (1996/02/09)      written by tanaka3@ifos.se.fujitsu.co.jp