“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.

I have presented at all but three of those IUCs, and the table below provided the titles of my presentations that also serve as links to the actual presentation files (PDF):

Of course, I have attended earlier IUCs, and also presented some of them. I may prepare a separate article to cover those presentations.

In closing, please be aware that I will be attending and presenting at the Face/Interface: Type Design and Human-Computer Interaction Beyond the Western World conference that takes place during the first two days of December at Stanford University in California. The title of my 20-minute presentation is Source Han Design & Development: Benefits, Challenges & Pitfalls. If the conference is of interest to you—which it should be if you’re reading this blog article—please consider attending.

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One of the fringe benefits of moving offices—especially when one has accumulated nearly 25 years of font-related material and it is thus not a pain-free exercise—is discovering historical documents, some of which turn out to be true gems. Our team is preparing to move from the Adobe East Tower to the West one, and part of the process is figuring which material to keep, and which to put into File 13. Anyway, I had been recently looking for a particular presentation that I prepared many years ago, and was fortunate enough to come across it while sifting through my accumulated materials.

This particular presentation, entitled Creating Fonts for the Unicode Kanji Set: Problems & Solutions, which I needed to scan into a PDF so that I could share it here, was delivered nearly 22 years ago at the Unicode Implementers’ Workshop 6 in 1994 (equivalent to IUC6). There are two important ideas that I presented:

• The idea to build Unicode CMap resources for CID-keyed fonts, which initially sparked the development of UCS-2 ones that were prematurely bundled with Adobe Illustrator Version 7.0, and which ultimately led to the development of fully-synchronized UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 ones, the last of which are used for the development of CID-keyed OpenType/CFF fonts
• The idea to build a Pan-CJK font whereby a non-zero number of Unicode code points would include multiple glyphs to accommodate language- or region-specific conventions, which ultimately led to the development of the open source Source Han Sans and Noto Sans CJK typeface families

I very much enjoyed re-reading this historical document, which was a blast from the past, and I hope that some of you enjoy reading it, too. It provided to me a good dose of perspective, to realize what had been accomplished in the two decades that followed.

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IUC39 (The 39th Internationalization & Unicode Conference) took place in Santa Clara earlier this week, and Adobe was once again proud to be a Gold Sponsor. It was another outstanding and successful conference, and as usual, one of the greatest benefits of the conference—besides the many excellent presentations—was the opportunity for face-to-face exchanges with Unicode leaders, experts, and enthusiasts.

Another benefit of attending these conferences is to acquire the limited-edition T-shirt, and the back of the IUC39 one is shown below, being modeled by Markus Scherer, Unicode Technical Director (the image featured on the back of the T-shirt is a Unicode Version 9.0 emoji candidate called FACE PALM with tentative code point U+1F926):

A good way to explore the highlights of the conference is via the #IUC39 hashtag.

Anyway, for those who were unable to attend the conference, the slides for my presentation, Pan-CJK Font Development Techniques, Tips, Tricks & Pitfalls, are available.

P.S. The image shown at the top of this brief article was used in a tweet whose screenshot was included on page 67 of my presentation.

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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. 🍷

(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.

The latest UTC meeting—the 143rd one to be exact—took place earlier this month, and was hosted by and at Adobe in downtown San José, California. A UTC meeting takes place every quarter, and takes up for discussion a variety of issues, such as new character proposals, proposed changes to UTRs, UTSes and UAXes, and the all-important feedback that is submitted via the official reporting form.

Up until a year or so ago, I would attend only the CJK-related portions of UTC meetings, either in person if the meeting was local, or by calling in via phone. I now attend the meeting in its entirety. I have been Adobe’s alternate representative to Unicode for nearly 10 years, and only recently became our primary representative. Adobe has been a Full Member since 1999. Attending an entire UTC meeting has a lot of benefits, the most important of which is visibility into the various processes that go into progressing the standard, along with the careful, thought-provoking, analytical, and professional discussions that take place.

For those who feel that Unicode is missing a particular character or characters, having observed the process of character encoding on multiple occasions, I can only state that the sooner that you submit a proposal, the sooner that they can be encoded, as long as the evidence that accompanies the proposal is sufficient. Furthermore, thanks to the recent plan to release a new major version of Unicode in the middle of each year, proposed characters are likely to become encoded sooner rather than later.

Some of my favorite Unicode-related resources, besides the standard itself, include the Code Charts, which allow quick access to the block in which a particular character or script is encoded, the Pipeline Table, which indicates the current status of characters that are expected to become part of the standard, the DerivedAge page, which is useful to determine in which version of Unicode a particular character was encoded, and the UTC Document Register, which is a good indication of what will be discussed during the next UTC meeting. The agenda and minutes for UTC meetings are also available in the UTC Document Register, and though still draft as of this writing, the UTC #143 minutes are now available.

For more information about becoming a member of The Unicode Consortium, be sure to check out the current membership and membership levels.

I very much look forward to attending the next UTC meeting.

I have been involved with IMUG—this abbreviation originally stood for International Macintosh User Group, but now stands for The International Multilingual User Group—since the early 1990s, presenting in 1993, 1995, 1999, 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2011, but more recently I have been involved with hosting this excellent user group at Adobe.

IMUG is a user group that is intended for GUILT (Globalization, Unicode, Internationalization, Localization & Translation) professionals (some people use GILT instead of the more proper GUILT, perhaps because they forget that Unicode provides the underpinnings for GILT ), and their monthly meetings offer plenty of variety. In addition to a presentation from a seasoned professional in this industry, each meeting offers attendees an opportunity to mingle with other like-minded professionals.

Five years ago, in early 2010, IMUG, along with other user groups, were told that Apple could no longer host their regular meetings. With management’s approval and blessing, I was able to commit to hosting up to half of IMUG’s monthly events at Adobe’s headquarters in downtown San José, and in our largest on-site conference room called Park. Some folks over at Google kindly stepped in to host the other half of their events, and companies such as Yahoo! and PayPal have also hosted IMUG on a less regular basis. In other words, Silicon Valley is the home of IMUG. The first IMUG meeting that was hosted at Adobe following IMUG’s departure from regular meetings at Apple was a presentation entitled iPhone App Localization and the China Smartphone Market, and the speaker was Lan Lin, and thanks to Adobe Connect, those who cannot attend in person can attend remotely. The more recent IMUG meetings hosted at Adobe have been recorded.

Adobe also hosts IMUG’s annual International Potluck and Holiday Bash, which takes place in early December. Of course, I cannot host IMUG meetings at Adobe on my own, and Janice Campbell (@_janicec) and others involved in globalization at Adobe offer plenty of assistance.

☞ The next IMUG meeting that will be hosted at Adobe will include a presentation entitled Source Han Sans & Noto Sans CJK: The World’s First Pan-CJK Typeface Families, and I am the speaker. In addition, anyone who becomes an IMUG Life Member ($100) during the May meeting will receive an autographed copy of my book, CJKV Information Processing, Second Edition (a $59.99 value).

For those who are interested, the table below lists the presentations that I have delivered during an IMUG meeting, and in most cases there is a link to the presentation slides:

IMUG can be following on Twitter at @i18n_mug, and tweets related to IMUG events can be found by searching for the #IMUG408 hashtag.

[This article is a refreshed version of a similar one that I wrote nearly three years ago, at the end of August of 2012.]

This week’s festivities have thus far included attending IUC38 in Santa Clara, California. I presented twice, both times about Source Han Sans and Noto Sans CJK development.

For those who were unable to attend this excellent conference, the slides for my two presentations, Developing & Deploying The World’s First Open Source Pan-CJK Typeface Family and Building Source Han Sans & Noto Sans CJK, are now available.

Enjoy!

P.S. The image shown above, which was used on page 47 of my first presentation to describe the Super OTC deployment configuration, became popular during IUC38, and was used by at least three other presentations. ☺

I call this Source Han Slate, and it is a 288-point letter cutting of Source Han Sans Medium 劍󠄁 (CID+62015; Adobe-Japan1-6 CID+14106; Adobe-Japan1 IVS <528D,E0101>), which is a variant form of 劍 (U+528D), onto a slab of green slate. I have only 65,534 glyphs left to letter cut.

Here’s a photo of me putting the finishing touches on this masterpiece (photo by Miguel Sousa):