Does a Japanese (La)TeX user really type commands start with the yen symbol(￥) as escape character instead of \?

Question

Recently, I've found that the Japanese use JIS X 0201 encoding as an alternative to ASCII. One of the biggest difference between them is the JIS X 0201 replace the backslash(\) with Japanese yen symbol(￥）.

This adaption of backslash leads to Microsoft Windows in Japanese locale uses ￥ in its directory path, e.g., C:￥user￥Alice￥document

Again, when using TeX, I guess, the Japanese should use ￥ as the command escape character to replace the missing \ in Japanese locale. Is this true?

I think Japanese (La)TeX users may be helpful for this question. :-)

Thanks at first!

Answer 1

Yes, this is true. Well, sort of.

Back in the days when computers were still fairly new, both Japanese and Korean encodings replaced the backslash with their currency symbol; that is, the character with the value 0x5c looks like ¥ on a Japanese machine, ₩ on a Korean machine, and \ everywhere else.

As operating systems moved to Unicode, you would think it would be possible for them to start using the proper symbol - but it isn't, because their keyboards don't actually produce that symbol. So, from a technical standpoint, it's a backslash, but the visuals are those of a yen/won sign. This is possible in the same way that this G looks different from this G; it's just a more extreme version of it.

To avoid having a text like ¥100 from suddenly reading \100, Japanese and Korean fonts essentially have to perpetuate this "mistake" - there is no simple migration path, because you can't know if they meant the backslash (e.g. as a path separator on Windows), or if they actually meant the currency symbol.

I happen to use a Japanese font (MS Gothic) in my editor, for the simple reason that I prefer it to other monospaced fonts - not because I actually do any Japanese writing or anything. That means that this small snippet from my preamble:

\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage{ucs}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

actually looks like this:

It takes a little getting used to, but as long as you don't need the actual ¥ sign (or ₩ for Korean fonts), it's not really a problem - you're not going to confuse one for the other, and the characters beneath the glyph still represent backslashes.