Archive for August, 2015

IUC39 Preparations

Posted on August 27, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

I am scheduled to present at IUC39 (The 39th Internationalization & Unicode Conference) in late October, and the title of my presentation is Pan-CJK Font Development Techniques, Tips, Tricks & Pitfalls. While the related presentations that I delivered at IUC38 last November focused on actual Source Han Sans and Noto Sans CJK development details, this presentation will be more general, and will instead focus more on techniques and best practices when developing large multilingual fonts, drawing on the experience of developing and deploying those two joined-at-the-hip typeface families when necessary.

I am currently dealing with properly categorizing the various tidbits of the presentation as Techniques, Tips, Tricks, or Pitfalls. I decided to combine Tips and Tricks into the single category Tips & Tricks, because they’re roughly the same, but mainly because I found an excellent image that conveys the meaning of tricks. ☺

Anyway, I still have a lot of work left to do on this presentation, but at least I have another two months to complete it.

As I may have mentioned in past articles, the benefits of this conference go beyond the scheduled presentations, and much of the value is the golden opportunity for face-to-face interaction with developers who are involved in the development of Unicode, or who are working with Unicode on a daily basis.

For those who are planning to attend IUC39, I look forward to meeting you there. 🍷

Managing XUID Arrays—Redux

Posted on August 27, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

To follow up on my June 2011 article about managing XUID arrays in CIDFont resources, which still conveys accurate information, it has come to our attention that the integer values for the second and subsequent XUID array elements should not exceed seven digits, meaning that 9999999 is the largest integer value that should be used. Integer values that exceed seven digits can result in some implementations treating the XUID arrays of different fonts within the same printing job the same, which affects font caching, and which can result in the wrong font being used to render some characters. This printing issue may happen even if the glyphs display correctly in the PDF file on screen.

Another solution is to simply omit the XUID array from the CIDFont resource header, which effectively disables font caching. For modern printers, font caching has little or no benefit.

Lastly, for those font developers who still include a UIDBase value in their CIDFont resource headers, it can be safely removed. In fact, I strongly recommend that it be removed.

IRG44

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

(Uni-chan image designed by Mary Jenkins)

IRG44 (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2/IRG Meeting #44), which was originally scheduled to take place from 2015-06-15 through 2015-06-19 in Seoul, Republic of Korea and was canceled due to MERS, will instead take place during the first part of next week in Beijing, People’s Republic of China, from 2015-08-24 through 2015-08-26.

Besides the obvious work on Extensions F1 and F2, other items of interest are the three UNC (Urgently Needed Character) proposals that will be discussed, from the UTC (two characters in IRG N2068), Japan (five characters in IRG N2078), and Macao SAR (36 characters in IRG N2071). Of particular interest is IRG N2071, because Section C.2 of IRG Principles and Procedures (IRG N2016) states that UNC submissions should not include more than 30 characters.

2015-08-21 Update: The revised version of Macao SAR’s IRG N2017 (N2071R) includes only 23 characters, meaning that it is now within the terms set forth in Section C.2 of IRG Principles and Procedures.

I have personal interest in IRG N2074, which provides preliminary details about Hong Kong SAR’s forthcoming HKCS (Hong Kong Character Set) 2015 standard, which is intended to replace Hong Kong SCS-2008. One reason for my interest is that I plan to support HKCS 2015 in the Source Han Sans Version 2.000 glyph set.

Although I cannot attend IRG44, a colleague and friend who works in our Beijing office will be attending as my proxy.