Early last August, I celebrated the release of Microsoft’s Windows 10 Anniversary Update (Version 1607, and also known as Redstone 1 or RS1), mainly because it represented the very first version of Windows OS to support OpenType/CFF Collections (aka OTCs). Alas, my favorite Source Han Sans—and now Source Han Serif—deployment format, the Super OTC that packs all of the fonts into a single and easy-to-manage font resource, could not be installed.
Fast-forward to exactly one week ago…
I am very pleased to report that our friends at Microsoft have addressed this issue in the Windows 10 Creators Update (Version 1703, and also known as Redstone 2 or RS2), which was released on April 11, 2017. The timing couldn’t have been better, as the Adobe-branded Source Han Serif and Google-branded Noto Serif CJK were released the week before. Unlike the Source Han Sans and Noto Sans CJK Super OTCs, which have 36 fonts, the Source Han Serif and Noto Serif CJK ones have a mere 28. The reason for the difference is the lack of “HW” (half-width ASCII) versions of the Regular and Bold weights that were deemed unnecessary.
We are now one step closer to having the Super OTC be the preferred deployment format for the Source Han and Noto CJK typeface families.
Comments
Ken,
Not sure whether this is the right place to leave this, but….
The Source Han Sans Super OTC works fine with Windows 10 v1703, but there’s something wrong with the zip file containing the Source Han Serif Super OTC and it can’t be unzipped. (I get two error messages, one about upon opening the SourceHanSerif.ttc.zip file and another one about a “missing header” when I continue and try to force it to unzip in Win Unzip; using Windows’ built-in unzip, I get an unknown error. I’ve tried this on two machines, so I’m pretty sure it’s a problem in the source zip.)
Really want to check out the Super OTC, so I’d appreciate it if you could look into this.
Best regards,
Jim Lockhart
Thank you, Jim, for reporting this issue. Based on our back-and-forth via email, the byte size of the two parts of the ZIP file provided a clue that allowed you to figure out what was going on, at least in your case: the ZIP files are on an NTFS disk with file compression turned on, and that turning off file compression does the trick. For the benefit of those who did not read this CJK Type Blog article and its comments, I just added to the Source Han Serif “release” branch landing page the byte size of the two ZIP file parts in parentheses.