Archive for August, 2014

IRG43

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

(Uni-chan image designed by Mary Jenkins)

In addition to attending IRG43 (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2/IRG Meeting #43) in November as a US/Unicode delegate, I will also be serving as the Adobe host for this meeting, which will take place at Adobe’s headquarters in downtown San José, California. It will be a busy week for me, because while I will need to stay focused on the meeting itself, I also need to be mindful of matters related to logistics, before and during the meeting. Extension F (called Extension F1 by the IRG) is in the process of being handed off to WG2, and work on Extension G (called Extension F2 by the IRG) is expected to begin in earnest before and during IRG43.

By the way, the last time that an IRG meeting was held in the US was IRG37, which was hosted by Google in Mountain View, California in November of 2011. Before that, it was IRG29, which was hosted by Adobe in November of 2007.

I am very much looking forward to the meeting, meeting with the delegates, and being part of important CJK Unified Ideograph work.

A commemorative T-shirt may be necessary… ☺

Pan-CJK Font Development Details

Posted on August 12, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Unless you have been living in a cave or under a rock, you’ve no doubt heard of Source Han Sans or Noto Sans CJK through the initial announcements from Adobe or Google who jointly developed them, or elsewhere. These two Pan-CJK typeface families, which are joined at the hip because they differ only in name, were released to the world at large, as open source fonts, on the afternoon of July 15, 2014 in the US, which was the morning of July 16, 2014 in East Asia, their target audience. Click on the preview below to view a single-page PDF that shows all 65,535 glyphs from one of these fonts:

Over the next several months I plan to publish a series of articles on this blog that will detail various aspects of the development process that I employed for building these two typeface families. Although the subsequent articles will mention only Source Han Sans by name, they also pertain to its twin, Noto Sans CJK.
Continue reading…

2015 = Unicode 8.0

Posted on August 3, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Given that Unicode has declared mid-year annual major releases, we can expect Unicode Version 8.0 to be released in about a year, in mid-2015. In terms of ideographs, we can expect some additions, specifically a small number of UNC (Urgently Needed Character) additions to the URO (Unified Repertoire & Ordering) that were discussed in the June article, along with Extension E. This single-page PDF provides a tentative look at the CJK Unified Ideographs, along with CJK Compatibility Ideographs for good measure.

Unicode Version 7.0 was release on June 16, 2014.