Posts in Category "Building Fonts"

Introducing FDArray Test

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

(The introductory graphic illustrates how the character 剣 (U+5263) is displayed using the fonts that are introduced in this article. The code point for this character maps to a glyph that displays as “63” in the FDArray Test 257 font, which is the hexadecimal equivalent of the decimal index of the FDArray element to which its glyph is assigned, which is 99. Likewise, the code point for this character maps to a glyph that displays as “52” in the FDArray Test 65535 font, which is the hexadecimal equivalent of the decimal index of the FDArray element to which its glyph is assigned, which is 82.)

I have built several CID-keyed OpenType/CFF fonts that are specifically designed to test various limits, by exercising various implementation limits, such as the number of glyphs (65,535 is the architectural limit), the number of FDArray elements (256 is the architectural limit), and the number of mappings in the ‘cmap‘ table (when the surrogates and non-characters are factored out, Unicode has 1,111,998 possible mappings in its 17 planes). I have sometimes made these fonts available, such as in this May of 2012 article that explains how such fonts can be built.

Anyway, I spent pretty much all day yesterday—except for a somewhat longer than usual lunch break that was actually used to watch The Martian (2015) with my wife—preparing a pair of open source CID-keyed OpenType/CFF fonts that exercise these limits but to different degrees, and I also managed to prepare and release the project on GitHub as FDArray Test.
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To V, Or Not To V

Posted on September 8, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Historically, there have been two methods of supporting vertical writing in CID-keyed OpenType/CFF fonts, in terms of specifying the ‘vert‘ (Vertical Alternates) GSUB feature. One method involved using a vertical CMap resource, which was supplied to the AFDKO makeotf tool as an argument to its no-longer-supported “-cv” command-line option, that was used to synthesize the ‘vert’ GSUB feature. The other method, which is the preferred one, involves defining a ‘vert’ GSUB feature in the “features” file that is supplied to the AFDKO makeotf tool. In this brief article, I will explain why the first method is no longer supported, but more importantly, why the second method is preferred.
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IUC39 Preparations

Posted on August 27, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

I am scheduled to present at IUC39 (The 39th Internationalization & Unicode Conference) in late October, and the title of my presentation is Pan-CJK Font Development Techniques, Tips, Tricks & Pitfalls. While the related presentations that I delivered at IUC38 last November focused on actual Source Han Sans and Noto Sans CJK development details, this presentation will be more general, and will instead focus more on techniques and best practices when developing large multilingual fonts, drawing on the experience of developing and deploying those two joined-at-the-hip typeface families when necessary.

I am currently dealing with properly categorizing the various tidbits of the presentation as Techniques, Tips, Tricks, or Pitfalls. I decided to combine Tips and Tricks into the single category Tips & Tricks, because they’re roughly the same, but mainly because I found an excellent image that conveys the meaning of tricks. ☺

Anyway, I still have a lot of work left to do on this presentation, but at least I have another two months to complete it.

As I may have mentioned in past articles, the benefits of this conference go beyond the scheduled presentations, and much of the value is the golden opportunity for face-to-face interaction with developers who are involved in the development of Unicode, or who are working with Unicode on a daily basis.

For those who are planning to attend IUC39, I look forward to meeting you there. 🍷

Managing XUID Arrays—Redux

Posted on August 27, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

To follow up on my June 2011 article about managing XUID arrays in CIDFont resources, which still conveys accurate information, it has come to our attention that the integer values for the second and subsequent XUID array elements should not exceed seven digits, meaning that 9999999 is the largest integer value that should be used. Integer values that exceed seven digits can result in some implementations treating the XUID arrays of different fonts within the same printing job the same, which affects font caching, and which can result in the wrong font being used to render some characters. This printing issue may happen even if the glyphs display correctly in the PDF file on screen.

Another solution is to simply omit the XUID array from the CIDFont resource header, which effectively disables font caching. For modern printers, font caching has little or no benefit.

Lastly, for those font developers who still include a UIDBase value in their CIDFont resource headers, it can be safely removed. In fact, I strongly recommend that it be removed.

Source Han Sans Version 1.004 Update

Posted on June 15, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Due to an inadvertent error on my part, the glyphs for the vertical-only kana were incorrect in Source Han Sans Version 1.002 (and, by extension, in Version 1.003 because there were no glyph changes). Many thanks to the person who identified and reported this issue, and I’d like to convey my sincere apologies to those who were affected by it.
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Introducing Source Han Code JP

Posted on June 11, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

[This article was written by Masataka HATTORI (服部正貴) and translated into English by yours truly.]

Source Han Code JP（日本語メニューネーム：源ノ角ゴシック Code JP）は、自分がほしくて個人的にはじめたオープンソースプロジェクトでした。Source Han Sans（源ノ角ゴシック）と Source Code Pro をフォールバックするエディタで使うと、漢字・仮名とくらべ英数字が小さくなってしまい全体的に読みにくいと感じていました。そんなとき、友人のプログラマーから、日本語も使えてコーディングにも適したフォントはないか？と相談されて、これは自分で作ってしまえと考えました。

オリジナルの Source Code Pro は、600 ユニット字幅を採用した欧文専用のモノスペースフォントで、まぎらわしいアルファベットや数字をディスプレイで判別しやすくするために、文字のデザインが工夫されています。それを、Source Han Sans JP（源ノ角ゴシック JP）の日本語と合わせてもフィットするようにサイズやウエイトを調整しました。文字幅は 660 ユニットあたりがちょうど良いと思いました。もともと読みやすさの観点から半角欧文はすこしコンデンスすぎると感じていたので、思い切って 2/3（667 ユニット）字幅を採用することにしました。一般的な半角（500 ユニット字幅）の等幅フォントにくらべ、全角文字との正確なインデントには向きませんが、読みやすさを確保しつつ、使い方次第で様々な表現ができると思いました。Source Han Code JP は、オリジナルの Source Han Sans JP と同じ７ウェイトのファミリーですが、ウェイトを切り替えても文字列の長さは変わりません。

結果的に、日本語を含むプログラミングやマークアップなどソースコードの表示や編集に使用できる Adobe Source シリーズの派生フォントとして、Adobe Fonts GitHub サイトから公開することになりました。

服部正貴

Read in English

Source Han Sans Version 1.003 Update

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Although it has been less than two months since the Source Han Sans Version 1.002 update was released, a Version 1.003 maintenance update was released on 2015-06-09 to address two particular issues. No glyphs nor Unicode mappings were added or modified.

Google’s corresponding Noto Sans CJK fonts, which continue to differ from Source Han Sans only by name, were also updated to Version 1.003 at the same time, and reflect the same changes.
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Source Han Sans Version 1.002 Update

Posted on April 20, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (2)

The Source Han Sans Version 1.002 update was released on 2015-04-20, which involved turning a very large crank on something that has a very large number of moving parts. The updated region-specific subset OTFs are also available on Typekit via desktop sync.

Google’s corresponding Noto Sans CJK fonts, which differ from Source Han Sans only by name, were also updated to Version 1.002 at the same time, and reflect the same changes.
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Introducing IVS Test

Posted on April 5, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Yesterday morning I came up with the idea to produce a font for testing the extent to which applications and other text-handling environments support IVSes (Ideographic Variation Sequences), and ended up devoting the better part of this Easter weekend assembling, testing, and releasing the font as open source on GitHub. The font is named IVS Test, and as usual for me, it is an Adobe-Identity-0 ROS CID-keyed OpenType/CFF font.
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GitHub Migration

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

I started the process of migrating to GitHub the font-related open source projects that I maintain, and recently finished. In some cases, the projects were split between SourceForge and GitHub, with the installable font resources (and sources) on the former, and only the sources on the latter. Some projects were available only on SourceForge.

There are a couple of motivations for this migration. First, GitHub provides a great user experience for posting, tracking, and responding to “Issues” for a project. In fact, I made good use of the mobile app for Android while vacationing in Wisconsin late last July. Second, we prefer the control that GitHub offers in terms of updating projects. I use the GitHub command-line tools, along with the SourceTree app for OS X, when initiating or updating projects on GitHub.
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