Posts in Category "Standards"

“Bahts is [not] parts”

Posted on March 26, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

—Mistakes happen—

—Humans make mistakes—

—Anything made by humans has the potential to include mistakes—

The most important things about mistakes are that 1) we recognize them, lest they propagate; 2) we learn from them; 3) we make an effort not to repeat them; and 4) we try to fix them, if possible.

Some mistakes are more easily fixed than others. Mistakes that cannot be fixed must be worked around.

With that said, an interesting event of historical significance occurred in June of 2000:
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The Missing Link

Posted on March 16, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

The first version of the IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) was issued on 2007-12-14, meaning over eight years ago, and there have been three subsequent revisions, the latest being issued on 2014-05-16. There are currently three registered IVD collections: Adobe-Japan1, Hanyo-Denshi, and Moji_Joho. A significant number of IVSes are shared between the latter two IVD collections, 9,685 to be exact. While I cannot speak to the latter two IVD collections, the Adobe-Japan1 one is supported by hundreds of OpenType fonts via the Format 14 (Unicode Variation Sequences) ‘cmap‘ subtable. Furthermore, the number of apps and OSes that support UVSes has reached critical mass.

With all that said, there is a rather substantial missing link in terms of IVD support infrastructure: the all-important input method.
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UTC #147

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (2)

The next UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) meeting, the 147th one, takes place during the week of May 9th, and will be hosted at the Adobe headquarters in San José, California. All members of the Unicode Consortium, especially voting members, are encouraged to attend.
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The “PanCJKV” IVD Collection—Unregistered

Posted on February 26, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (16)

Much of the thinking that I did with regard to this unregistered—but hopefully soon-to-be-registered—IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) collection was done while visiting my parents in South Dakota, with one of the highlights of that trip being a scenic drive through Badlands National Park.

First and foremost, please forget, or at least ignore, most everything that was written in the 2016-02-13 and 2016-02-20 articles (which makes one wonder why I am linking to them, but I digress). Far too many things have changed, and what I present in this article represents the IVD collection that I hope will be registered later this year.
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The Experimental “PanCJKV” IVD Collection—Redux

Posted on February 20, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (3)

Continuing where I left off with the first article about this subject, I’d like to point out some of the implementation details and their ramifications in this article.
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The Experimental “PanCJKV” IVD Collection

Posted on February 13, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (2)

One of my longer term goals for the open source Source Han Sans project has been to eventually register a Pan-CJK IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) collection that would allow the regional variants to display and be preserved in “plain text” environments, and I think that I may have achieved a breakthrough the other day.
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“My God, it’s full of stars! And turtles and dragons!”

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

CJK Unified Ideographs is a very deep and fascinating subject, and there are people who sometimes— and anecdotally—claim that it is a bottomless pit (or infinite tunnel, hence the quote in this article’s title). The latter may appear to be accurate, especially when one considers what is happening on that front, such as Extension F with its 7,473 new characters slated for Unicode Version 10.0 in June of 2017, and with work on Extension G commencing.
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Discovering Historical Gems

Posted on February 4, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

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.
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An Early Look At Unicode Version 10.0

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

It is with great sadness that I write that Unicode Version 9.0, whose beta was authorized yesterday, on the last day of UTC #146, will include no additional CJK Unified Ideographs. The next opportunity for additional CJK Unified Ideographs is therefore Unicode Version 10.0, which is slated for a June 2017 release, and is expected to include 21 Urgently Needed Characters (UNCs) that are appended to the URO (Unified Repertoire & Ordering), along with Extension F (see IRG N2156 for the latest version) that currently includes 7,473 characters.

Interestingly, and as long as Extension F’s block remains stable, there are only 3,088 code points remaining in Plane 2 (SIP), specifically U+2EBF0 through U+2F7FF, along with 1,502 code points at the end of Plane 2, immediately following CJK Compatibility Ideographs Supplement, specifically U+2FA20 through U+2FFFD.

The image above is an excerpt of a PDF that shows what Unicode Version 10.0 is likely to include in terms of ideographs. If you click on the image, you will get the actual PDF. Of course, the yellow stuff is tentative and subject to change.

Updated on 2016-06-26 to reflect the additional UNC appended to the URO at U+9FEA, along with a net decrease of 12 characters in Extension F, reducing it to 7,473 characters.

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Ideographic Tally Marks

Posted on January 28, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

In late 2015, I collaborated with Daisuke MIURA to submit a proposal (L2/15-328) to the UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) to encode the characters for four tally mark systems. The proposal was discussed during UTC #146, and the result was that the five ideographic tally mark characters were accepted. Good news.

The Script Ad Hoc Committee originally recommended in their report for UTC #146 (see page 9 of L2/15-037) that IDEOGRAPHIC TALLY DIGIT TWO not be encoded, because they felt that it could be unified with U+1D36E (COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT SIX), but concerns over typographic consistency led to it being accepted as a separate character.
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