MonTeX provides Mongolian and Manju support for the TeX/LaTeX community.

Mongolian is a language spoken in North East Asia, namely Mongolia and the Inner Mongol Autonomous Region of China. Today, it is written in an extended Cyrillic alphabet in Mongolia whereas the Uighur writing continues to be in use in Inner Mongolia, though it is also, legally speaking, the official writing system of Mongolia.

Manju is another language of North East Asia, belonging to the Tungusic branch of the Altaic languages. Though it is hardly spoken nowadays, it survives in written form as Manju was the native language of the rulers of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) in China. Large quantities of documents of the Imperial Archives survive, as well as some of the finest dictionaries ever compiled in Asia, like the Pentaglot, a dictionary comprising Manju, Tibetan, Mongolian, Uighur and Chinese. MonTeX provides all necessary characters for writing standard Mongolian in Cyrillic and Classical (aka Traditional or Uighur) writing, and Manju as well as transliterated Tibetan texts, for which purpose a number of additional characters was created.

In MonTeX, both Mongolian and Manju are entered in romanized form. The retransliteration (from Latin input to Mongolian and Manju output) is completely realized in TeX/Metafont so that no external preprocessor is required.

Please note that most of the enhanced functions of MonTeX require a working e-LaTeX environment. This is especially true when compiling documents with Mongolian or Manju as the main document language. It is recommended to choose pdfelatex as the resulting PDF files are truly portable. Vertical text generated by MonTeX is not supported in DVI.

The author is Oliver Corff.