Author Archive: Dr. Ken Lunde

How much interest in AFDKO for other platforms?

Posted on February 10, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (13)

We have made AFDKO (Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType) available for Mac OS X and Windows, but we also realize that these are not the only OSes that font developers prefer to use. In an effort to make AFDKO more appealing to more font developers, and more broadly available, we’d like to gauge the interest in supporting additional OSes, particularly Linux and other Unix-like OSes (mainly because AFDKO tools are, for the most part, batch- and command-line driven).
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What if…

Posted on February 8, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (4)

…Adobe were to host a font-development workshop in Japan, with a focus on leveraging specific AFDKO tools to simplify the effort needed to develop OpenType Japanese fonts? Tools, such as tx, mergeFonts, rotateFont, autohint, and stemHist, immediately come to mind. While there are currently no concrete plans in place, if there were to be sufficient demand for such an event, along with suggestions for specific topics to be covered, a tentative agenda could be produced.

Until such an event is scheduled and actually takes place, Adobe Tech Note #5900 (AFDKO Version 2.0 Tutorial: mergeFonts, rotateFont & autohint), which includes a Japanese translation, should prove to be useful. This document is included in AFDKO as part of its documentation, but its link is provided above for convenience.

I encourage anyone with an interest in attending such a workshop, to be held in Japan, to post comments that include suggestions for topics to be covered.

どうぞ自由に日本語で書いて下さい。

To Subroutinize, Or Not To Subroutinize

Posted on February 3, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

One of the benefits of OpenType/CFF, whether you’re building name- or CID-keyed fonts, is that the ‘CFF‘ table can be subroutinized. And, the AFDKO makeotf tool can be used to apply subroutinization when building OpenType/CFF fonts. The tx tool, by using its “+S” option, can do so as well.
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CMap Resource Names Explained

Posted on February 1, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

For the longest time I have felt that the names used for many of our CMap resources deserve some amount of explanation. I see these names written in books from time to time, and it usually gives me a chuckle, mainly because I am the one responsible for coining many of them. This post is an opportunity for me to provide (some) definitive answers, along with some history. Of course, if this post raises more questions, please submit a comment, and I will make an honest effort to provide a timely answer.

In general, and with few exceptions, a CMap resource name is composed of a character set name, and encoding name, and a writing direction. For the most part, it is the character set names that deserve some explanation, because the encoding and writing direction names are fairly straight-forward. Also, whenever I mention a CMap resource name, it almost always has a corresponding vertical CMap resource.
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CMap Resource Updates

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Unicode Version 6.1 was released today (January 31, 2012). This release triggered an update to the Unicode CMap resources for Adobe-Japan1-6 and Adobe-Korea1-2. The updated CMap resources are now available at the CMap Resources open source project that is hosted at Open @ Adobe. Details have been posted.

Given that Unicode has become the de facto encoding for digital text for modern environments, I encourage readers of this blog to explore for themselves what is new in Unicode Version 6.1.

Excruciating details about the Adobe Tech Note #5079 update

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

I spent the early part of this week updating Adobe Tech Note #5079 (The Adobe-GB1-5 Character Collection). The number of glyphs remained the same (30,284), as did the glyphs themselves. So, why the update? Well, mainly to bring it in line, format-wise, with the other three related Adobe Tech Notes: #5078 (The Adobe-Japan1-6 Character Collection), #5080 (The Adobe-CNS1-6 Character Collection), and #5093 (The Adobe-Korea1-2 Character Collection). The biggest effort was to create its 61-page glyph table. Besides announcing the update, building the glyph table is the substance of this blog post.
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An “Extreme” OpenType Font

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (3)

I like building fonts. I especially like building fonts with a large number of glyphs. Fortunately, my job entails developing OpenType CJK fonts, which means that I need to deal with fonts with thousands or tens of thousands of glyphs.

I built an “extreme” OpenType font last year, and spent the morning making it even more extreme. Given that “extreme” fonts are useful for stress-testing software that consumes fonts, I figured that this post would be a good opportunity to make it available to developers who may benefit by testing with this font.

Did I mention that I like building fonts? ☺
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Adobe-Japan1-6 Turns 20 Years Old

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

The Adobe-Japan1-6 Character Collection, which has become the de facto glyph set for today’s mainstream OpenType Japanese fonts, celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This glyph set began its life in 1992, as Adobe-Japan1-0 (Supplement 0). Given that I have been at Adobe longer than 20 years, and was involved in the development of this glyph set, I will use this opportunity to detail some of its history, at least as seen through my eyes.
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AFDKO “features” File Tips & Tricks, Part 2: GSUB Features for Public ROSes

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

When developing CID-keyed OpenType/CFF fonts that are based on one of our public ROSes—meaning Adobe-GB1-5, Adobe-CNS1-6, Adobe-Japan1-6, or Adobe-Korea1-2 (including their earlier Supplements)—it is a good idea to leverage existing resources. One of these resources are the registered GSUB (Glyph SUBstitution) features that we define when building OpenType/CFF fonts that are based on these ROSes. Of course, if you build an OpenType/CFF font based on the special-purpose Adobe-Identity-0 ROS, you’re pretty much on your own in terms of defining its GSUB features, but this CJK Type Blog post from earlier this month demonstrated how existing GSUB features for our public ROSes can be used as the basis for such fonts.
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Two Adobe Tech Note Updates

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Two of our font- and CJK-related Adobe Tech Notes were updated this week. One aspect of the update is for issuing a new Supplement or to correct representative glyphs. Another aspect is to typeset the document according to latest practices. For these Adobe Tech Notes, the latter aspect involved changing their static glyph tables into a form that is more efficient, more useful, and more dynamic.
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