For those AFDKO users who use, plan to use, or would like to explore the broad capabilities of its tx tool, here’s a command line that is very useful when building new versions of existing fonts, especially when only a small number of glyphs have changed:
% tx -bc -sha1 -z 400 <font_file>
The <font_file> portion of the command line can be any type of font file, such as an OpenType font, a CFF resource, a CIDFont resource, or a name-keyed Type 1 font.
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As mentioned at the end of the May 15, 2012 CJK Type Blog article, I will demonstrate in this article how to build a CID-keyed font with 64K glyphs (CIDs 0 through 65534) and 256 FDArray elements. These represent two limits that are inherent in CIDFont resources.
Again, the incredibly powerful AFDKO mergeFonts tool will perform most of the work.
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Today, I want to demonstrate how the AFDKO mergeFonts tool can be used to quickly and easily build a CID-keyed font that includes 64K glyphs, meaning CIDs 0 through 65534. This is the maximum number of glyphs that a CIDFont resource can contain. This font, of course, will use the special-purpose Adobe-Identity-0 ROS, and although its is a CID-keyed font, it will include only one FDArray element.
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Adobe has thus far released two CID-keyed OpenType/CFF fonts that use the special-purpose Adobe-Identity-0 ROS (“ROS” is an abbreviation for /Registry, /Ordering, and /Supplement, which represent the three /CIDSystemInfo dictionary elements that are present in CIDFont and CMap resources): Kazuraki SP2N L (かづらき SP2N L) and Kenten Generic. The former is a commercial OpenType/CFF font, and the latter is an open source one. I have also developed several Adobe-Identity-0 ROS OpenType/CFF fonts for testing purposes, many of which have been provided in recent CJK Type Blog articles, the most recent of which being the May 9th, 2012 article.
The big question that may be on a font developer’s mind is under what circumstances is it appropriate to use the Adobe-Identity-0 ROS?
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In the April 20, 2012 CJK Type Blog article, I wrote about the publishing of ISO/IEC 14496-28:2012 (Composite Font Representation), which provides a venue for breaking the 64K glyph barrier that is inherent in all sfnt-based font formats, including name- and CID-keyed PostScript fonts. If the number of glyphs of the combined component fonts that are referenced by a CFR object exceed 64K, would constitute breaking the 64K glyph barrier.
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In my work, I need to deal with character codes on a regular basis, such as Unicode scalar values and hexadecimal values for legacy encodings. This includes writing documents that include them. For most purposes, especially when used in tables, tabular figures work best because they are monospaced. Of course, one could simply choose to use a monospaced font. But, unless a different font is actually desired for character codes, using the same typeface design is usually preferred, because it better matches the surrounding text. The issue is that very few, if any, fonts include tabular glyphs that support hexadecimal notation, specifically referring to ‘A’ through ‘F’ (or ‘a’ through ‘f’ for lowercase). Luckily, I was able to solve this particular dilemma.
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In the realm of CJK Unified Ideographs, there is always talk about no more characters to encode, or that any new characters are simply unifiable variants. This is, in large part, merely wishful thinking.
In my experience, there are three important words to embrace: Never Say Never.
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Almost three years ago, in a September 2009 article on the sister blog, Typblography, we showed a poster for our Kazuraki (かづらき) typeface, which was designed by Ryoko Nishizuka (西塚涼子), who was also its typeface designer. A request came in today for a PDF version of the poster, and instead of posting it into that relatively old (and now buried) article where it would not likely be noticed, I figured that it’d be best to post it here, today.
Click ☞ here ☜ to get the PDF version of the Kazuraki poster.
Enjoy! And for those in Japan, have a safe and enjoyable Golden Week!
For those who develop fonts—professionally or otherwise—it is prudent to know where the latest and greatest documentation is located. This is useful not only when searching for specific documentation, but also to check whether there are any updates to existing documentation.
The right-side navigation bar of this blog’s landing page includes links to relevant documentation and resource pages, such as for font-related Adobe Technical Notes, the OpenType Specification (hosted on Microsoft’s website), and even AFDKO (Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType). Also, don’t forget about the excellent font developer resources offered by Apple (Fonts), FontLab, and Microsoft (Microsoft Typography).
Among the many excellent and powerful tools included in AFDKO (Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType) is one with a two-letter name: tx. Although it has the shortest name, it is arguably one of the most powerful AFDKO tools.
The tx tool is best thought of as a multi-purpose font-file–manipulation tool. For those who don’t leverage this tool in the font development activities, I strongly encourage you to explore its capabilities, which is best done by perusing its built-in help and through experimentation.
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