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).

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