Japan announced the name of their new era, 令和 (reiwa), today. This announcement has set several things into motion, one of which is the publishing of the Adobe-Japan1-7 specification that adds CIDs 23058 and 23059 as the respective horizontal and vertical forms of the two-kanji square ligature form that will be encoded as U+32FF ㋿ SQUARE ERA NAME REIWA in Unicode Version 12.1. Font developers can now reference the Adobe-Japan1-7 specification.
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Prompted by recent activity on Twitter, I assembled a new mapping file that correlates Adobe-Japan1-6 CIDs (aka glyphs) to Source Han ones, but only for the 6,879 characters in the JIS X 0208 standard. Because the Source Han Sans and Source Han Serif glyphs sets are different, they require separate columns in the mapping file. Also, for the 161 kanji in JIS X 0208 that have both JIS90 (aka JIS X 0208-1990) and JIS2004 (aka JIS X 0213:2004) forms, the CIDs that correspond to the JIS2004 forms are indicated, and those for the JIS90 forms are in brackets.
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I spent part of last week preparing the Adobe-Japan1-7 character collection specification update, which will be released sometime in early April, shortly after Japan announces the name of their new era name. (Until the update is released next month, Adobe-Japan1-6 is still reflected in the open source project.) The announcement is expected to take place on 2019-04-01, and while this date represents the start of a new fiscal year in Japan, it is an unfortunate choice for elsewhere.
Anyway, while performing said update, I came across a reference to Adobe Tech Note #5094, Adobe CJKV Character Collections and CMaps for CID-Keyed Fonts, which I last updated a dozen years ago. I decided to use this as an opportunity to obsolete yet another Adobe Tech Note by incorporating its meaningful content into the open source CMap Resources project. I did precisely that last week, which involved updating its content in the process.
This is a brief article to draw readers’ attention to my latest test font, which is a 12-font 65,535-glyph OpenType/CFF Collection that is intended to test how well an app or other font-consuming environment supports language tagging for East Asian text, to include the handling of localized strings, such as those for menu names in the 'name' table, and for named Stylistic Set 'GSUB' features.
The Variable Font Collection test fonts that were made available at the beginning of this month serve this purpose to some extent, but they also require an environment that supports not only Variable Fonts (aka OpenType/CFF2 fonts), but also Variable Font Collections (aka OpenType/CFF2 Collections). The main intent of this OpenType/CFF Collection is to remove the Variable Font baggage from the testing requirement. It also includes support for Macao SAR as a third form of Traditional Chinese, which was described in the previous article.
Please visit the open source Source LOCL Test project for more details, or to download the pre-built OpenType/CFF Collection binary from the Latest Release page.
Enjoy!
Macao SAR (SAR stands for Special Administrative Region)—written 澳門特別行政區 or 澳門特區—is in the process of standardizing MSCS (Macao Supplementary Character Set or 澳門增補字符集 in Chinese), which is character set standard that is designed as a supplement to HKSCS (Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set), and by extension, as a supplement to Big Five. One reliable source told me that MSCS can be described as HKSCS plus approximately 150 additional characters.
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This is a short article that is simply meant to draw developers’ attention to three OpenType/CFF2 Collections (aka Variable Font Collections) that I built this week, which are now available in the open source Variable Font Collection Test project. As stated in the project, the purpose of these Variable Font Collections is to simulate the Source Han and Noto CJK fonts deployed as Variable Fonts, to help make sure that the infrastructure—OSes, apps, layout engines, libraries, and so on—will support them. Remember that it took several years for Microsoft to support OpenType/CFF Collections (OTCs), which finally happened on 2016-08-02. In other words, this is not trivial.
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“Everything that has a beginning, has an end. I see the end coming.” — The Oracle
To first provide some background, I started to work at Adobe right before we invented CID-keyed fonts. The first desktop (aka non-printer) deployment of CID-keyed fonts was in the form of “Naked-CID fonts” in 1993 or so, which required ATM (Adobe Type Manager) to be installed. While such fonts were available for Macintosh and Windows OSes, Naked-CID fonts for the latter OS were incredibly short-lived and therefore rare, and were subsequently replaced with OpenType/CFF fonts in the late 1990s. Naked-CID fonts for the former OS were replaced by “sfnt-wrapped CIDFonts” (aka “sfnt-CID fonts”) in the mid-1990s, and also required that ATM be installed. Adobe Tech Note #5180, entitled “CID-Keyed sfnt Font File Format for the Macintosh,” details the sfnt-wrapped CIDFont format, which is specific to Macintosh due to its use of a resource fork.
With that stated, fonts are among the most perpetual and resilient of digital resources, meaning that discontinuing support for legacy font formats cannot be done quickly, and many years must pass before it can be realistically considered.
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(Everything that is stated in this article applies to the corresponding Google-branded Pan-CJK typeface family, Noto Sans CJK. Likewise, any reference to Source Han Serif also applies to Noto Serif CJK.)
The last time that a new version of the Source Han Sans family, along with the Google-branded version, Noto Sans CJK, was released was in June of 2015 in the form of Version 1.004. I know from personal experience that a lot of planning, preparation, and work took place during the three years that followed, and the end result is Version 2.000 of both Pan-CJK typeface families.
If you’re interested in learning more details about some of the changes, enhancements, and additions that Version 2.000 offers, please continue reading this article.
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Flashback to almost exactly a year ago.
We released Ten Mincho (貂明朝) Version 1.000 during MAX Japan 2017, and I published this marten-laced article that provided technical details about its fonts. Now, a year later, and during MAX Japan 2018, we have released Version 2.003 of this cute and mischievous typeface family. Please continue to read if you have interest in details about the new and updated fonts that are included as part of this Japanese typeface family.
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（翻訳：Adobe Type チーム 山本太郎、西村美苗）
あれからほぼ一年たった。
貂明朝のバージョン 1.000 をリリースしたのは、昨年の MAX Japan 2017 開催中のことだった。そのフォントの技術的な詳細に関しては、この記事を書いて、おまけに、貂の写真を何枚も貼り付けておいた。さて 1 年後の今、同じく MAX Japan 2018 の開催期間中に、この妖しくも可愛い書体ファミリーのバージョン 2.003 をリリースした。この日本語書体ファミリーに新たに追加されたフォントやその他の改善点について、技術的詳細を知りたい方はこの記事を参照されたい。
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