Posts in Category "Building Fonts"

Font Development Via Unicode

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Unicode has become the de facto way in which to represent text in digital form, and for good reason: its character set covers the vast majority of the world’s scripts. Other benefits of Unicode include the following:

  • That it is under active and continuous development, meaning that with each new version, more scripts are being supported, and additional characters for existing scripts are being standardized.
  • That it is aligned and kept in sync with ISO/IEC 10646 (available at no charge), which is quite a feat.

With regard to font development, Unicode is considered the default encoding for OpenType, which refers to the ‘cmap‘ table. The most common ‘cmap’ subtables are Formats 4 (BMP-only UTF-16) and 12 (UTF-32). The latter is used only when mappings outside of the BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane), meaning from one or more of the 16 Supplementary Planes, are used.
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「CSS Orientation Test OpenType Fonts」について

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

[This Japanese version of the May 31, 2013 article entitled CSS Orientation Test OpenType Fonts is courtesy of Hitomi Kudo (工藤仁美).]

五月三十一日にアドビの新しいオープンソースプロジェクトで、「CSS Orientation Test OpenType Fonts」をリリースしたのでお知らせします。このオープンソースプロジェクトは、Unicodeの次期UTR #50（「Unicode Vertical Text Layout」）のエディタである石井宏治氏のリクエストをもとに開発された、二つのOpenType/CFFフォントを含みます。これらフォントの目的は、フォント開発者がより簡単にグリフの方向に関するテストを行えるよう考慮したものです。
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CSS Orientation Test OpenType Fonts

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

I am pleased to announce that the new CSS Orientation Test OpenType Fonts open source project was launched on Adobe’s open-source portal, Open@Adobe, today. This open source project consists of two OpenType/CFF fonts that were developed at the request of Koji Ishii (石井宏治), the editor of Unicode’s forthcoming UTR #50 (Unicode Vertical Text Layout). The purpose of these fonts is for developers to be able to more easily test whether glyph orientation in their implementation is correct or not.
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OpenType ‘cmap’ Table Ramblings

Posted on May 29, 2013 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

OpenType fonts are ‘sfnt’ (scalable font) resources that are comprised of several well-defined tables. One of these tables, which is the topic of today’s article, is the ‘cmap‘ (character map) table. The ‘cmap’ table, put simply, maps characters codes to Glyph IDs (GIDs) that refer to glyphs in the ‘glyf‘ or ‘CFF‘ (Compact Font Format) table, depending on the “flavor” of the OpenType font. What is important about the ‘cmap’ table is that it makes the glyphs usable. Without the ability to map from character codes, which are used by virtually all applications and OSes, the glyphs in a font are useless, and cannot be readily accessed or used.
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Gothic/Myungjo or Dotum/Batang?

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (3)

The prototypical Serif and Sans Serif typeface style distinction in Korean has traditionally used the names Myeongjo (명조체/明朝體 myeongjoche) and Gothic (고딕체/고딕體 godikche), respectively. But, in 1993, the Republic of Korea (South Korea) Ministry of Culture, in an attempt to standardize typographic terms, recommended the use of Batang (바탕 batang) and Dotum (돋움 dotum) as the proper names for these two typeface styles.

At the time the Ministry of Culture recommendation was made, which was a period when printing was the most common use of fonts, Batang was meant for body text, and Dotum was for display or emphasis purposes. Mobile devices have provided a new use for Dotum, because its lack of serifs provided superior readability on mobile devices with smaller screens that necessitated smaller point sizes, and the original rationale for these new names seems to no longer apply.

From what I can tell, Korean type foundries have not embraced the Batang and Dotum names, and have actually resisted their use. What probably didn’t help was the fact that Microsoft released TrueType fonts with these exact names, with no additional qualifiers: Batang and Dotum. In other words, it seems that Microsoft’s use of these names polluted their chance at more widespread use, because they were treated as typeface names, not typeface style names.

In closing this brief article, I am curious about what our blog readership thinks about this particular issue. I welcome any and all comments.

Adobe Blank: Another Adobe-Identity-0 Implementation

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

As I wrote nearly a year ago, the Adobe-Identity-0 ROS is useful for building special-purpose fonts, especially CJK ones whose glyph coverage does not match one of our public ROSes. Our latest Adobe-Identity-0 ROS font is the open-source Adobe Blank, whose purposes and implementation details are described on our sister blog, Typblography.

Standardized Variants—Part 3

Posted on December 30, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

I will close this particular topic by detailing how to support these proposed standardized variants in OpenType/CFF fonts.

For fonts that are currently IVS-enabled, such as those that include Format 14 ‘cmap’ subtables with Adobe-Japan1 or Hanyo-Denshi IVSes, it is important to note that the proposed standardized variants can co-exist with them, at least in terms of being specified in the font. For the former, I created an Adobe-Japan1_sequences.txt file that includes all registered Adobe-Japan1 IVSes, along with 89 of the 1,002 proposed standardized variants. The 89 standardized variants are at the end of the file. AFDKO tools, such as makeotf and spot, already support these standardized variants. When building OpenType/CFF fonts using the makeotf tool, this file is specified as the argument of the “-ci” command-line option.
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Standardized Variants—Part 2

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

To continue from the December 26, 2012 article, I should first point out that there is a relationship between these 1,002 proposed standardized variants and IVSes (Ideographic Variation Sequences). Standardized variants are standardized, hence their name. IVSes, on the other hand, are registered via a process that is described in UTS #37 and administered by the IVD Registrar (which happens to me at the moment).
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Standardized Variants—Part 1

Posted on December 26, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (2)

One problem that has been plaguing CJK Compatibility Ideographs is the fact that they are adversely affected by normalization. Regardless of which of the four normalization forms is applied—NFC, NFD, NFKC, or NFKD—they are converted to their canonical equivalents, which are CJK Unified Ideographs. This is a problem, particularly for Japan, because 75 kanji in JIS X 0213:2004 kanji map to CJK Compatibility Ideograph code points. Furthermore, 57 of these 75 kanji correspond to Jinmei-yō Kanji (人名用漢字), meaning that they are used for personal names. The bottom-line problem with CJK Compatibility Ideographs is that any application of normalization, by any process, will permanently remove any distinctions between a CJK Compatibility Ideograph and its canonical equivalent. Not all processes are under one’s direct control, meaning that it is impossible to guarantee that normalization will not be applied. My opinion is that it is prudent to assume that normalization will be applied, and that preemption is the best solution.
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Old Hangul—Redux

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

In the December 4, 2012 Old Hangul article I mentioned that the ‘ccmp’ GSUB feature that is referenced in Microsoft’s Developing OpenType Fonts for Korean Hangul Script document is not necessary. Jaemin Chung kindly pointed out to me that environments that do not yet support Unicode Version 5.2 still require the ‘ccmp‘ (Glyph Composition/Decomposition) GSUB feature to be present, otherwise proper shaping will not happen.

The main purpose of this short article is to provide a revised Perl script, named mkoldhangul-ccmp.pl, that adds a complete ‘ccmp’ GSUB feature definition for environments that do not yet support Unicode Version 5.2 (or greater). The sample glyph-map.txt datafile that maps the Unicode-based glyph names to CIDs is unchanged.