Author Archive: Dr. Ken Lunde

Traveling Abroad

I don’t travel very often as part of my work at Adobe, but when I do, it is always to East Asia. (I have never been to Europe.) The last time I traveled as part of my job was two years ago, to attend IRG 34 in Nagaoka, Japan.
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Be warned…

For those who signed up to attend the AFDKO Workshop that takes place on the 25th of this month in Tokyo, be warned that I will be conducting my portion, which is from 10AM until noon, in Japanese, or at least in my rendition of Japanese. ☺

Seriously, though, I hope that my Japanese skills, or lack thereof, don’t serve as an impediment for those who attend this workshop. My focus will be to demonstrate how particular AFDKO tools, such as tx, mergeFonts, rotateFont, autohint, and so on, can be used to not only build, but also to directly manipulate CID-keyed fonts. My hope is that I can convey useful information that can serve as inspiration for making font production workflows more efficient and less time-consuming.

For those who are attending, note that materials will be provided that will be based on a small subset of Kozuka Gothic Medium. If any attendee wants to use their own font data for this purpose, I suggest that you bring along an Adobe-Japan1-0 or greater OpenType/CFF font or CIDFont resource. I have prepared scripts that will quickly create the same materials, but using a different base font.

Wish me luck in finishing the accompanying presentation, which currently has 24 slides. In Japanese.

I am very much looking forward to meeting everyone who has signed up to attend this workshop!

Preparing for the Tokyo AFDKO Workshop

I am spending most of my time preparing for the Tokyo AFDKO Workshop that Morisawa is hosting at their Tokyo office on the 25th of this month, which is a Monday. At this point, most of the sample data is ready, and I now need to prepare the accompanying presentation slides.

This will be my first opportunity to engage a larger number of font developers, and to convey to them useful tips, tricks, and techniques for several AFDKO tools, particularly tx, mergeFonts, and rotateFont. My portion of the workshop, which will consume the entire morning, will be about building and manipulating CID-keyed fonts, to include controlling the assignment of CIDs (glyphs) to FDArray elements. I will also cover the use of the special-purpose Adobe-Identity-0 ROS. I am very much looking forward to this event, and working directly with many font developers.

Note that this workshop will be conducted in Japanese.

AFDKOワークショップ

ご注意:6月25日開催のAFDKOワークショップに多数のお申し込みをいただきありがとうございます。定員に達しましたので、AFDKOワークショップへの受付を締め切らさせていただきました。お申込みいただいた皆様とお会いできることを楽しみにしております。よろしくお願い申し上げます。

2012年6月25日、株式会社モリサワのご協力により、同社東京本社におきましてAFDKOワークショップを開催いたしますのでお知らせいたします。

弊社のAFDKO(Adobe© OpenType©フォント開発キット)を利用されてフォント制作を行われている開発者の方々を対象としたワークショップとなります。それぞれのツールについて有効な利用法について、弊社米国本社のKen Lunde(ケン・ランディ)を含む弊社スタッフが説明する予定です。ぜひご参加ください。
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Stay tuned…

As alluded to in the February 8, 2012 CJK Type Blog article, there is a good chance that an AFDKO Workshop will take place in Japan, very soon. Please stay tuned to this blog for details, which may emerge in less than a week.

ISO/IEC 10646:2012 Published!

ISO/IEC 10646:2012 (Third Edition) was just published. This is the first version of the standard that includes multiple-column Code Charts for Extension B, and for CJK Compatibility Ideographs. Another significant aspect of ISO/IEC 10646:2012 is that it is equivalent to Unicode Version 6.1.

For Adobe, the publishing of this new version of the standard represents a significant milestone, because it means that every Adobe-Japan1-6 kanji is either directly encoded, or is directly associated with a registered IVS in the IVD (Ideographic Variation Database).

Speaking of Unicode Version 6.1, the printed version of the Core Specification is available via POD from Lulu, and at a very attractive price.

Hong Kong or Bust!

I just received good news, in the form of confirmation that both of my ATypI Hong Kong 2012 presentation abstracts were accepted, which means that I will definitely be attending this conference. I alluded to this in the March 30th, 2012 CJK Type Blog article. One of the abstracts is for a 30-minute presentation entitled Kazuraki: Under The Hood, which will immediately follow a 30-minute presentation entitled Kazuraki: Its Art & Design, that will be presented by my colleagues Taro Yamamoto (山本太郎) and Ryoko Nishizuka (西塚涼子). For those who are not aware, Ryoko is the typeface designer of Kazuraki (かづらき), which is the centerpiece of both 30-minute presentations. The other is for a three-hour workshop entitled Manipulating CID-keyed Fonts Using AFDKO Tools, which will be co-presented by my colleague Masataka Hattori (服部正貴).

I am very much looking forward to attending an ATypI conference for the first time, and meeting many people. If you are planning to attend ATypI Hong Kong 2012, please be sure to introduce yourself to me, in case I don’t introduce myself to you first.

CMap Resource Updates & Change Policies

For those font developers who are not aware, the official CMap resource repository for our public ROSes is the CMap Resources open source project at Open @ Adobe, which is hosted by SourceForge. When CMap resources are updated, in addition to providing the updates through this portal, an announcement is made in the CMap Resources Forum.

The UTF-16 and UTF-32 CMap resources were introduced in August of 2001, beginning with Adobe-CNS1-4. Those for Adobe-Korea1-2 and Adobe-Japan2-0 followed in January of 2002, followed by those for Adobe-GB1-4 in June of the same year. The UTF-16 and UTF-32 CMap resources for Adobe-Japan1-5 were not released until November of 2002. From that point, the UCS-2 CMap resources were deprecated, and were no longer updated. Clients that used the UCS-2 CMap resources were encouraged to use the UTF-16 or UTF-32 ones instead. For OpenType font development, in terms of building the Unicode (Format 4 and 12) ‘cmap‘ subtables, the UTF-32 CMap resources are recommended.
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Adobe-Japan1-6 Unicode Version 6.1 Tables

Years ago, I wrote a Perl script, called unicode-rows.pl, that takes a fully-qualified PostScript name—composed of a CIDFont resource name, two hyphens, and a UTF-32 CMap resource name—then generates a PostScript file that can be distilled into a PDF. The resulting PDF file is a Unicode table, arranged in groups of 256 code points. If the UTF-32 CMap resource includes even a single mapping for a particular group of 256 code points, a page is created.

I have prepared examples that are based on the UniJIS2004-UTF32-H and UniJIS-UTF32-H CMap resources.
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“All Of Unicode” CFR Object

As alluded to at the end of the May 9, 2012 CJK Type Blog article, I had plans to build additional CFR objects for testing purposes. That particular article supplied two 64K-glyph OpenType/CFF fonts, which provided BMP and Plane 1 coverage, and served as component fonts for the supplied CFR object, UnicodeGetaCFR.cfr. In today’s article, I will supply a CFR object that encompasses all of Unicode, meaning the BMP and the 16 Supplementary Planes, along with the component fonts that it references. In other words, coverage for 1,112,030 code points, each of which has a unique glyph. These represent valuable testing resources for developers who plan to support CFR objects in their products as a way to break the 64K glyph barrier.
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