CJK Type Blog

“Out of the blue.”

I was sitting near the back of a crowded room, filled with many familiar faces, when the two-day conference proper of IUC42 (42nd Unicode & Internationalization Conference) began promptly at 9AM on September 11, 2018, with Mark Davis, President of Unicode, making the opening statements. When Mark announced the recipient of this year’s Unicode Bulldog Award, it took me by complete surprise when I heard my name called. Wow. What an absolute honor. In fact, I would claim that this is one of the biggest honors of my life, especially given that Unicode now transcends so many aspects of our society. Looking back at the 27 prior recipients of this award, almost all of whom I consider to be friends, I am definitely in good company.

Luckily for this blog’s readership, Rick McGowan managed to capture all of my embarrassing moments in a three-minute video. You can also see the tweets that were published by @unicode and @AdobeType.

For better or worse, the proverbial bar has been raised, in terms of others’ expectations of me. I shall therefore endeavor not to disappoint. #MaximumEffort

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I have attended every Internationalization & Unicode Conference (IUC) since IUC31 in 2007, and Adobe has been a continuous Gold Sponsor since IUC31. Unfortunately, duty calls, in the form of attending and hosting IRG #49 that takes place during the same week as IUC41, which means that I can neither attend nor present this year. Of course, Adobe continues to be a Gold Sponsor of this important event.
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(Uni-chan image designed by Mary Jenkins)

IRG44 (ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2/IRG Meeting #44), which was originally scheduled to take place from 2015-06-15 through 2015-06-19 in Seoul, Republic of Korea and was canceled due to MERS, will instead take place during the first part of next week in Beijing, People’s Republic of China, from 2015-08-24 through 2015-08-26.

Besides the obvious work on Extensions F1 and F2, other items of interest are the three UNC (Urgently Needed Character) proposals that will be discussed, from the UTC (two characters in IRG N2068), Japan (five characters in IRG N2078), and Macao SAR (36 characters in IRG N2071). Of particular interest is IRG N2071, because Section C.2 of IRG Principles and Procedures (IRG N2016) states that UNC submissions should not include more than 30 characters.

2015-08-21 Update: The revised version of Macao SAR’s IRG N2017 (N2071R) includes only 23 characters, meaning that it is now within the terms set forth in Section C.2 of IRG Principles and Procedures.

I have personal interest in IRG N2074, which provides preliminary details about Hong Kong SAR’s forthcoming HKCS (Hong Kong Character Set) 2015 standard, which is intended to replace Hong Kong SCS-2008. One reason for my interest is that I plan to support HKCS 2015 in the Source Han Sans Version 2.000 glyph set.

Although I cannot attend IRG44, a colleague and friend who works in our Beijing office will be attending as my proxy.

Contrary to the opinion of some of those who have never participated in a UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) meeting, whose attendees include representatives from companies, organizations, and even governments, along with individual members, all of whom share a strong passion for the continued development of The Unicode Standard (TUS), which has become the de facto way in which to represent digital text on virtually all modern devices. These representatives and individual members are world-class experts who are also incredibly sensitive to cultural and regional issues that affect the interpretation and usefulness of the standard, and do everything in their power to ensure that it is usable in the broadest possible way. No other character set standard can even come close to making such a claim.

To put this into perhaps better perspective, standard-wise, it takes a typical government entity years to accomplish what The Unicode Consortium accomplishes in only one year.
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