New on CTAN: showhanmengrid
showhanmengrid draws the hanmen grid of Japanese text in the background of every page: one square per character position in cyan, and in magenta the part of the text area that does not fit the grid, i.e. a text block that is not set solid (beta-gumi). It works with pLaTeX, upLaTeX and LuaLaTeX + LuaTeX-ja, in both yoko and tate. v1.1 detects a character pitch other than 1zw (\kanjiskip or the JFM, e.g. shibu-aki), notes it in the top margin and can place the squares at the actual pitch (pitch=natural). Trim marks of jclasses/jsclasses, gentombow and jlreq-trimmarks are taken into account.
The package’s Catalogue entry can be viewed at https://ctan.org/pkg/showhanmengrid The package’s files themselves can be inspected at https://mirrors.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/showhanmengrid/
Thanks for the upload. For the CTAN Team Petra Rübe-Pugliese
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Showhanmengrid – Show the hanmen grid of Japanese text and its overflow on every page
The hanmen (the basic text block) of Japanese typesetting is built from the character size, the number of characters per line, the number of lines per page and the line feed. This package draws, in the background of every page, one square for each character position of the hanmen, so that you can check that every character of the body text sits in its square.
It also draws in magenta the part of the text area that does not fit the grid: a \textwidth that is not a multiple of the character size, or a \textheight that is not filled by whole lines. Such a text area, common when only the four margins are given, stretches inter-character spaces, i.e. the text is not set solid. Both horizontal (yoko) and vertical (tate) writing are supported.
When the character pitch is not the character size (space between ideographs given by \kanjiskip or by the JFM, e.g. shibu-aki), a note is drawn in the top margin, and the squares can be placed at the actual character pitch. Trim marks that move the page (the tombo option of jclasses, gentombow, jlreq-trimmarks) are taken into account.
Supported formats/engines: platex, uplatex (with dvipdfmx), LuaLaTeX with LuaTeX-ja (LaTeX2ε 2025-06-01 or later).
| Package | Showhanmengrid |
| Version | 1.1 2026-10-25 |
| Copyright | 2026 Munehiro Yamamoto |
| Maintainer | Munehiro Yamamoto |