Posts in Category "Standards"

JIS X 0213 versus kIRG_JSource

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

To continue yesterday’s article about different prototypical glyphs for Unicode code points that are common between JIS X 0212-1990 and JIS X 0213:2004, today’s article will focus on the normative references that correspond to JIS X 0213:2004, or rather the lack thereof.


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JIS X 0212 versus JIS X 0213

Posted on April 7, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Most Japanese font developers are—perhaps painfully—aware of the 168 kanji whose prototypical glyphs changed in 2004 via the JIS X 0213:2004 standard. What is not broadly known are those kanji whose prototypical glyphs are different between JIS X 0212-1990 and JIS X 0213 (both versions).

JIS X 0212-1990 was established in 1990, and included 5,801 kanji in a single block. JIS X 0213:2000 was established a full ten years later, and included 3,685 kanji in two levels (1,249 kanji in Level 3, and 2,436 in level 4). Ten additional kanji were added in JIS X 0213:2004, bringing the total to 3,695. When the Unicode code points that correspond to these two JIS standards are compared, 2,743 of them are common, 3,058 are specific to JIS X 0212-1990, and 952 are specific to JIS X 0213:2004.

Interestingly, when the prototypical glyphs of the 2,743 kanji that are in common—in terms of having a shared Unicode code point—are compared, 31 of them are different. I prepared a single-page table that shows the differences using genuine Heisei Mincho W3 (平成明朝W3) glyphs, which also provides Adobe-Japan1-6 CIDs for all but three of the JIS X 0212-1990 prototypical glyphs (these three glyphs are thus candidates for Adobe-Japan1-7). Also, all of the JIS X 0213 kanji are from the original 2000 version, except for the one that corresponds to U+7626 that was introduced in 2004. This character’s entry is shaded in the PDF.

Unicode Beyond-BMP Top Ten List—2014 Redux

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

It’s hard to imagine that it has been nearly three years since I posted the always-enjoyable Unicode Beyond-BMP Top Ten List, so I figured that an updated version, which takes into account developments that have transpired since then, was in order for the current year of 2014.

Enjoy!

China’s 通用规范汉字表 (Tōngyòng Guīfàn Hànzìbiǎo)

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

As the title makes blatantly obvious, today we will cover a topic about China (中华人民共和国 zhōnghuá rénmín gònghéguó).
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IDS + OpenType: Pseudo-encoding Unencoded Glyphs

Posted on March 24, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)


For those who are not aware, there are twelve IDCs (Ideographic Description Characters) in Unicode, from U+2FF0 through U+2FFB, that are used in IDSes (Ideographic Description Sequences) which are intended to visually describe the structure of ideographs by enumerating their components and arrangement in a hierarchical fashion. Any Unicode character can serve as a IDS component, and the IDCs describe their arrangement. The IRG uses IDSes as a way to detect potentially duplicate characters in new submissions. All existing CJK Unified Ideographs have an IDS, and new submissions require an IDS.

This article describes a technique that uses IDSes combined with OpenType functionality to pseudo-encode glyphs that are unencoded or not yet encoded. If memory serves, it was Taichi KAWABATA (川幡太一) who originally suggested this technique.
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From The Archives: JIS2004 CMap Resource History

Posted on March 15, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

[For those who are interested in reading my own release notes for the Adobe-Japan1-6 UTF-32 CMap resource history, which includes the non-JIS2004 ones, I made them available here on January 20, 2016.]

I was recently asked, indirectly via Twitter, about changes and additions that were made to our JIS2004-savvy CMap resources, specifically UniJIS2004-UTF32-H and UniJISX02132004-UTF32-H. The former also includes UTF-8 (UniJIS2004-UTF8-H) and UTF-16 (UniJIS2004-UTF16-H) versions that are kept in sync with the master UTF-32 version by being automagically generated by the CMap resource compiler (and decompiler), cmap-tool.pl, which I developed years ago.

Of course, all of these CMap resources also have vertical versions that use a “V” at the end of their names in lieu of the “H,” but in the context of OpenType font development, the vertical CMap resources are virtually unused and worthless because it is considered much better practice to explicitly define a ‘vert‘ GSUB feature for handling vertical substitution. In the absence of an explicit definition, the AFDKO makeotf tool will synthesize a ‘vert’ GSUB feature by using the corresponding vertical CMap resources.

With all that being said, what follows in this article is a complete history of these two CMap resources, which also assign dates, and sometimes notes, to each version.
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OpenType Collections—Redux

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

As described in last month’s article, our tools engineer developed two Python scripts for assembling and disassembling ‘sfnt’ collections, both of which operate on TrueType-based source fonts to produce a traditional TrueType Collection (TTC) font or to break apart one, but also operate on CFF-based source fonts to produce a new font species known as an OpenType Collection (OTC).

The purpose of this follow up article is to convey the news that these scripts have been tweaked slightly, and have been included in a new version of AFDKO that was released on 2014-02-18 as Build 61250. One of the benefits of the integration with AFDKO is that the tools are now easier to run, as a simple command.
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Introducing & Building OpenType Collections (OTCs)

Posted on January 27, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

I would like to use this opportunity to introduce two new things.

First, OpenType Collections. TrueType Collections have been around for many years, and are commonplace for OS-bundled fonts. What I am speaking of are ‘sfnt’ Collections that include a ‘CFF ‘ (PostScript charstrings) table rather than a ‘glyf‘ (TrueType charstrings) one. The advantage of an ‘sfnt’ Collection is that fonts that differ in minor ways can be combined into a single resource, which can provide substantial size savings.

Second, brand new AFDKO tools, in the form of two Python scripts, for building, breaking apart, and displaying a synopsis of an OTC’s tables. These scripts were developed by our incredibly talented font tools engineer, Read Roberts, so all thanks should go to him for preparing them.
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GB 18030 Oddity or Design Flaw?

Posted on January 14, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

I spent a couple of days curling up with GB 18030 (both versions: 2000 and 2005), which is PRC’s latest and greatest national character set standard, and came across an oddity that my gut tells me is a design flaw. At the very least, it is an issue about which font developers need to be aware.

What I found were eight instances of CJK Unified Ideographs with a left-side Radical #130 that uses the Traditional Chinese or Taiwan-style form, instead of the expected Simplified Chinese or PRC-style form that looks the same as Radical #74. Screen captures from the latest Unicode Code Charts, whose glyphs agree with both versions of GB 18030, are shown below:

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PRI 259

Posted on December 10, 2013 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

As the IVD Registrar, I am very pleased to announce PRI 259 (Public Review Issue #259), which is the combined registration of the new Moji_Joho IVD Collection and sequences for that IVD collection. According to procedures set forth in UTS #37 (Unicode Technical Standard #37, Unicode Ideographic Variation Database), the 90-day public review, which commences today, allows interested parties to submit comments, suggestions, and errors to the registrant via Unicode’s reporting form.
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