Archive for March, 2012

ATypI Hong Kong 2012

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (3)

I am extraordinarily pleased that the upcoming ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale) conference will be held in Hong Kong: ATypI Hong Kong 2012. The dates are October 10th through the 14th, 2012, and the theme is between black and white (墨 in Chinese). For font developers who relish at the thought of discussing font-related issues and ideas with others in the same industry, the annual ATypI conference represents a unique opportunity. And, given its venue for this year’s iteration, a larger-than-usual number of CJK font developers are likely to attend, and the number of CJK-related presentations and workshops should be greater than usual.

In any case, I am planning to attend and present at this conference, and very much look forward to meeting other CJK font developers there.

Always Check Your Outlines

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

The photo below, which was recently taken by my long-term Adobe colleague Dirk Meyer in Beijing, serves as a not-so-gentle reminder that intersecting outlines can result in very obvious printing errors:

The photo depicts the two ideographs 出口, which represent the word meaning exit. The glyphs are obviously designed through the use of components whose outlines necessarily intersect, and under some circumstances—including the circumstance that led to the printing of this signage—can result in a negative or reverse fill.
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Not One, But Three, IVD Code Charts

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Thanks to an excellent suggestion from Taichi Kawabata (川幡太一), the 2012-03-02 version of the IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) includes three IVD Code Charts, which were released today. The two earlier versions of the IVD—2007-12-14 and 2010-11-14—included only one IVD Code Chart, named IVD_Charts.pdf.
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Another CJK-related Adobe Tech Note has been revised…

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

I spent the better part of last weekend revising Adobe Tech Note #5099, which was originally published in 1998 (14 years ago). If memory serves, I wrote the bulk of the original version of this document while on vacation in Indonesia. It seemed like the thing to do at the time.
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Morisawa Type Design Competition 2012

Posted on March 15, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (2)

[I’d like to preface this article by stating that it was written and contributed by our esteemed colleague, Taro Yamamoto (山本太郎), who manages our Japanese typeface design efforts in our Tokyo office. — KL]

We were very pleased to hear the news that Morisawa announced the Morisawa Type Design Competition 2012 to be held this year. This triennial competition was held from 1984 to 2002, and this announcement means that they have reintroduced it. The type design categories for entries are Kanji and Latin.
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Building UTF-32 CMap Resources

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (3)

When using AFDKO to develop CID-keyed OpenType/CFF fonts, the most important CMap resources are the UTF-32 ones, for the following reasons:

  1. Unicode has become the de facto character encoding for today’s OSes and applications.
  2. When the font includes mappings outside the BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane), the Format 12 (UTF-32) ‘cmap‘ subtable is included. When a font includes only BMP mappings, the AFDKO makeotf tool is smart enough not to create a Format 12 ‘cmap’ subtable, and instead creates only a Format 4 (BMP-only UTF-16) one.
  3. UTF-32 is arguably the most human-readable of the Unicode Encoding Forms, because its big-endian hexadecimal representation is simply the Unicode Scalar Value without the “U+” prefix and zero-padded to eight digits.

The AFDKO makeotf tool is used to build a fully-functional font, and a UTF-32 CMap resource is specified as the argument of its “-ch” command-line option.
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CJK Compatibility Ideographs

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Unicode Version 6.1 includes a total of 1,002 CJK Compatibility Ideographs. The February 22, 2012 CJK Type Blog article includes a table that provides the details in terms of when they were added to Unicode, version-wise.

Of the 1,002 CJK Compatibility Ideographs that are in Unicode, 89 have Japanese sources. The Japanese sources are JIS X 0213:2004, Jinmei-yō Kanji (人名用漢字), IBM, and ARIB STD-B24. In addition, some of them have multiple Japanese sources, and while most of them are intended to use the same glyph regardless of the source, a very small number of them—three to be precise—do not.
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IVD Version 2012-03-02 Released

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

As the IVD Registrar, I am very pleased to announce that a new version of the IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) was released on March 2nd, 2012. It incorporates the results of PRI 183 and PRI 187.
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IUC36

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

I am pleased to announce that Adobe once again has the privilege and honor of being a Gold Sponsor of the Internationalization & Unicode Conference, the 36th iteration of which will take place in October of this year.

For those who have had the opportunity to attend this conference in the past, I am preaching to the choir when I state that much of the benefit of attending is not from listening to the scheduled sessions—though they have incredible value—but rather that there is an opportunity to have face-to-face discussions with others in the industry.

If you plan to attend IUC36, I hope to see you there!