MnTTeX
			     Tools for Typesetting
				      the
			 Secret History of the Mongols
				  Version: 0.3


Author: Oliver Corff, oliver.corff@email.de
Date: December 26, 2004

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 not appear as pleasing as the printed result.


Oliver Corff, Ulaanbaatar, 2004-12-26