Archive for November, 2016

New For Unicode Version 10.0: Hentaigana—変体仮名

Posted on November 22, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

Prior to Japan’s script reform of 1900, there was more than one shape associated with each syllable of the hiragana syllabary. There is now only one shape associated with each syllable. The now-obsolete and nonstandard shapes are referred to as hentaigana (変体仮名), which simply means variant kana. Hentaigana are still in use today in Japan, but are limited to Japan’s family registry (戸籍 koseki in Japanese) and specialized uses, such as business signage and other decor that are specifically designed to convey a feeling of nostalgia or traditional charm.

In addition to the Wikipedia article that is linked from the previous paragraph, 『変体仮名のこれまでとこれから—情報交換のための標準化』 (The past, present, and future of hentaigana: Standardization for information processing) by TAKADA Tomokazu (高田智和) et al. and About the inclusion of standardized codepoints for Hentaigana by YADA Tsutomu (矢田勉) serve as excellent reading material.
Continue reading…

Combining Jamo Test #2—Please Ignore

Posted on November 4, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

To (significantly) expand yesterday’s super exciting article, and in the continued interest of (stress-)testing the extent to which combining jamo works in various browsers—and when being served as a fully-functional webfont via Adobe Typekit—if you click here, you will open a 40MB HTML file that includes all 1,626,875 possible three-character combining jamo sequences (125 leading consonants, 95 vowels, and 137 trailing consonants) rendered using Adobe Clean Han and its 'ljmo' (Leading Jamo Forms), 'vjmo' (Vowel Jamo Forms), and 'tjmo' (Trailing Jamo Forms) GSUB features.

🐡

Combining Jamo Test #1—Please Ignore

Posted on November 3, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

In the interest of testing the extent to which combining jamo works in various browsers—and when being served as a fully-functional webfont via Adobe Typekit—if you click here, you will open a 200K HTML file that includes all 11,875 possible two-character combining jamo sequences (125 leading consonants and 95 vowels) rendered using Adobe Clean Han and its 'ljmo' (Leading Jamo Forms), 'vjmo' (Vowel Jamo Forms), and 'tjmo' (Trailing Jamo Forms) GSUB features.

🐡