The earlier part of this year was spent preparing new and revised glyphs for the Source Han Sans and Google-branded Noto Sans CJK Version 2.001 update, which also involved changing several mappings. The fonts for the former Pan-CJK typeface family were released today, and as usual, the all-inclusive—and highly-recommended—45-font Super OTC (OpenType Collection) is easily downloaded from the latest release page. See the official ReadMe (will download if clicked) for more details about this release. 70 of the Source Han Sans Version 2.001 fonts are also available via Adobe Fonts (formerly Adobe Typekit).
The efforts that went into this release culminated with Japan’s 2019-04-01 announcement of their new era name, 令和 (reiwa), whose two-kanji square ligature form will be encoded as U+32FF ㋿ SQUARE ERA NAME REIWA in Unicode Version 12.1.0 that is expected to be released on 2019-05-07. The Version 2.000 fonts included placeholder glyphs for U+32FF that are now populated with the actual glyphs in the Version 2.001 fonts. Its horizontal and vertical glyphs are shown in the 14-frame animated GIF above.
Additional HK (Hong Kong) glyphs resulted in the number of ideographs that require five unique glyphs to increase from 66 to 68. In terms of ideographs that require four unique glyphs, that figure increased from 739 to 746.
Up until this release, the lengthy per-weight glyph synopsis PDFs have shown only the per-language Unicode mappings with useful annotations. This release adds 132 pages that show all 65,535 glyphs indexed by CID. The glyphs for U+2E3A ⸺ TWO-EM DASH and U+2E3B ⸻ THREE-EM DASH, which are too wide to appear in the table cells, have blue placeholder boxes that reference a small table on page 132 that shows them in wider table cells. (As an aside, using my high-end MacBook Pro with 2.9GHz Core-i9 processor and 32GB of memory, it took Adobe InDesign approximately 20 minutes to export each 132-page glyph synopsis PDF. This is a reminder that this app doesn’t like long documents nor long multiple-page tables.)
I’d like to use this opportunity to personally thank our newest team member in our Tōkyō office, Taisei Yoshida (吉田大成), for taking on the task of preparing the new and revised Chinese glyphs for this update. As mentioned in this article from last November, Ryoko Nishizuka (西塚涼子) took on the task of redesigning the glyphs for bopomofo as part of the Version 2.000 update. In other words, our talented design team is expanding their skills beyond those for designing Japanese glyphs.
In closing, I’ll leave the 65,535 glyphs of Source Han Sans Version 2.001 below for your enjoyment (click to view or download the full-fidelity PDF version):
Comments
Ken, from what I have been reading so far, I see support for Noto Sans CJK in Adobe apps. We have been struggling to successfully open a PDF generated using jasper and Noto Sans CJK in Adobe Acrobat, while same works in Foxit PDF. I had given details in this forum thread. I have downloaded the Adobe Reader DC font pack but that does not help. Any pointers as to what could be missing here?
Vinay – JasperReports is using a VERY OLD (10+ years) version of an open source library against the wishes of the author of that library (see https://itextpdf.com/en/resources/faq/legal/itext-5-legacy/can-itext-217-itextsharp-416-or-earlier-be-used-commercially). It should come as no surprise that such an old version has bugs and produce invalid PDFs – as demonstrated in the thread that you linked to.
I would strongly suggest that you contact the folks at JasperReports and get them to update their PDF creation library.
How can we add support for new japanese era support font pack in adobe reader DC?
Any help is thankful.
The Kozuka Mincho (小塚明朝) and Kozuka Gothic (小塚ゴシック) fonts that are bundled with Adobe Acrobat DC were updated to Version 7.001 early last month, to support Adobe-Japan1-7. I just checked the latest version of Adobe Acrobat DC, and I see that Version 6.014 of Kozuka Mincho Pr6N R and Kozuka Gothic Pr6N M are currently bundled. A forthcoming update should include the Version 7.001 fonts.