Japan announced the name of their new era, 令和 (reiwa), today. This announcement has set several things into motion, one of which is the publishing of the Adobe-Japan1-7 specification that adds CIDs 23058 and 23059 as the respective horizontal and vertical forms of the two-kanji square ligature form that will be encoded as U+32FF ㋿ SQUARE ERA NAME REIWA in Unicode Version 12.1. Font developers can now reference the Adobe-Japan1-7 specification.
For those who were not aware, the Unicode CMap resources for Adobe-Japan1-7 were published last year in the open source CMap Resources project.
The animated images above show CIDs 23058 and 23059 in all six weights of Kozuka Mincho (updated to Adobe-Japan1-7), whose glyphs were designed by Adobe’s Chief Type Designer, Ryoko Nishizuka (西塚涼子). Ditto for Kozuka Gothic below:
Comments
I think it’s funny that they announce it a month early to give IT time to adjust, and then they go and pick a character that spotlights UniHan issues (令).
While there are indeed Unihan considerations for U+4EE4 令, as exemplified by the Source Han typefaces that include separate JP (shared by KR), CN, and TW (shared by HK) glyphs, there are none when it is used as the first component ideograph of U+32FF SQUARE ERA NAME REIWA, because it is a character that is specific to Japan. Implementations are certainly free to design CN and TW forms of this two-ideograph square ligature, but it is completely unnecessary.