I have been involved with IMUG—this abbreviation originally stood for International Macintosh User Group, but now stands for The International Multilingual User Group—since the early 1990s, presenting in 1993, 1995, 1999, 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2011, but more recently I have been involved with hosting this excellent user group at Adobe.
IMUG is a user group that is intended for GUILT (Globalization, Unicode, Internationalization, Localization & Translation) professionals (some people use GILT instead of the more proper GUILT, perhaps because they forget that Unicode provides the underpinnings for GILT ☺), and their monthly meetings offer plenty of variety. In addition to a presentation from a seasoned professional in this industry, each meeting offers attendees an opportunity to mingle with other like-minded professionals.
Five years ago, in early 2010, IMUG, along with other user groups, were told that Apple could no longer host their regular meetings. With management’s approval and blessing, I was able to commit to hosting up to half of IMUG’s monthly events at Adobe’s headquarters in downtown San José, and in our largest on-site conference room called Park. Some folks over at Google kindly stepped in to host the other half of their events, and companies such as Yahoo! and PayPal have also hosted IMUG on a less regular basis. In other words, Silicon Valley is the home of IMUG. The first IMUG meeting that was hosted at Adobe following IMUG’s departure from regular meetings at Apple was a presentation entitled iPhone App Localization and the China Smartphone Market, and the speaker was Lan Lin, and thanks to Adobe Connect, those who cannot attend in person can attend remotely. The more recent IMUG meetings hosted at Adobe have been recorded.
Adobe also hosts IMUG’s annual International Potluck and Holiday Bash, which takes place in early December. Of course, I cannot host IMUG meetings at Adobe on my own, and Janice Campbell (@_janicec) and others involved in globalization at Adobe offer plenty of assistance.
☞ The next IMUG meeting that will be hosted at Adobe will include a presentation entitled Source Han Sans & Noto Sans CJK: The World’s First Pan-CJK Typeface Families, and I am the speaker. In addition, anyone who becomes an IMUG Life Member ($100) during the May meeting will receive an autographed copy of my book, CJKV Information Processing, Second Edition (a $59.99 value).
For those who are interested, the table below lists the presentations that I have delivered during an IMUG meeting, and in most cases there is a link to the presentation slides:
| Date | Presentation Title |
|---|---|
| 1993-06-17 | Understanding Japanese Information Processing |
| 1995-02-16 | Adobe Systems’ CID-Keyed Fonts For Large Character Sets |
| 1999-01-21 | Adventures in Multilingual Publishing |
| 2005-08-18 | The Adobe-Japan1-6 Character Collection (presentation) |
| 2008-02-21 | Ideographic Variation Sequences: Implementation Details (presentation) |
| 2010-09-16 | Kazuraki: Adobe Systems’ Groundbreaking New Japanese Typeface (presentation) |
| 2011-05-19 | The Power of “Plain Text” & The Importance of Meaningful Content (presentation) |
IMUG can be following on Twitter at @i18n_mug, and tweets related to IMUG events can be found by searching for the #IMUG408 hashtag.
[This article is a refreshed version of a similar one that I wrote nearly three years ago, at the end of August of 2012.]
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