Posts in Category "Standards"

HKSCS-2016 & Adobe-CNS1-7

Posted on July 4, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

Unlike Unicode, which has been on an annual release cycle from Version 7.0, mainly to provide predictability to the release schedule for the benefit of developers, national standards—particularly East Asian ones—are updated much less frequently.

The latest East Asian national standard to be updated is HKSCS (Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set). HKSCS-2016, the fifth version of this particular standard, was published in May of 2017. As a result, and for the benefit of font developers whose fonts are based on Adobe’s public glyph sets, I used the morning of 🇺🇸’s Fourth of July of this year to publish Adobe-CNS1-7 via the CMap Resources open source project.
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When Simplified Chinese Isn’t Exactly Simplified

Posted on May 31, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

Er, um, oops.

✨🙈✨🙉✨🙊✨

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Source Han Unicode

Posted on May 10, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

One of my hobbies is apparently to explore various ways to stress-test Adobe products, and the target of today’s article happens to be recent adventures with Adobe InDesign and our Source Han families.

The background is that I produced Unicode-based glyph synopses as part of the Source Han Sans and Source Han Serif releases, but those PDFs show only up to 256 code points per page, and it takes several hundred pages to show their complete Unicode coverage. I also produced single-page PDFs that show all 65,535 glyphs. A Source Han Sans one is available here, and a Source Han Serif one is available here. However, they are not Unicode-based.
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Source Han Sans vs Source Han Serif

Posted on May 8, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (9)

At seemingly every opportunity, whether via this blog or during public speaking engagements, I have made it abundantly clear that the Adobe-branded Source Han families share the same glyph set as the corresponding Google-branded Noto CJK families. That is simply because it is true. What requires a bit of explanation, however, is how the two typeface designs—Source Han Sans and Source Han Serif—differ. That is what this particular article is about.

As the Project Architect of these Pan-CJK typeface families, I have my fingers on all of the data that was used during their development, and for preparing each release. I can therefore impart some useful tidbits of information that cannot be found elsewhere.
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Three Multiple-Family Super OTCs

Posted on April 24, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (18)

To take the previous article further—and because I tend to have an urge to stress-test environments—I added two more Super OTCs to the Source Han Super OTC open source project this morning.
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Introducing Source Han Super OTC

Posted on April 23, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (9)

The release of Source Han Serif earlier this month, on 2017-04-03, gave me an opportunity to build yet another resource for stress-testing environments, particularly those that consume OpenType/CFF Collections. (This also continues to simplify file management by combining three Super OTCs into a much larger one.)
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April 11, 2017—Another Date Which Will Live In Dignity

Posted on April 18, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (2)

Early last August, I celebrated the release of Microsoft’s Windows 10 Anniversary Update (Version 1607, and also known as Redstone 1 or RS1), mainly because it represented the very first version of Windows OS to support OpenType/CFF Collections (aka OTCs). Alas, my favorite Source Han Sans—and now Source Han Serif—deployment format, the Super OTC that packs all of the fonts into a single and easy-to-manage font resource, could not be installed.
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Designing & Implementing Biáng

Posted on April 8, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (2)

Besides being the world’s first open source serif-style Pan-CJK typeface families, the Adobe-branded Source Han Serif and the Google-branded Noto Serif CJK also represent the first broad deployment of two highly-complex and related ideographs that are in the process of being encoded. Their glyphs are shown above in all seven weights. Although it may be hard to believe, the fourth line illustrates the simplified version.
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IVD Topic: Duplicate Sequence Identifiers

Posted on March 3, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

The IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) is all about ideograph variants. Up until earlier this year, its scope was limited to CJK Unified Ideographs, per UTS #37 (Unicode Ideographic Variation Database). Its scope now includes characters with the Ideographic property that are not canonically nor compatibly decomposable, which still excludes CJK Compatibility Ideographs.

In an ideal world, a particular glyph—whether it’s considered the standard (aka encoded) form or an unencoded variant of the standard form—would be associated with a single registered IVS (Ideographic Variation Sequence) within an IVD collection. However, we do not live in a perfect world, and several real-world conditions can lead to duplicate sequence identifiers within an IVD collection.
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To GPOS, Or Not To GPOS

Posted on February 15, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

I will open this article by stating that OpenType features are almost always GSUB (Glyph SUBstitution) or GPOS (Glyph POSitioning). The former table specifies features that substitute glyphs with other glyphs, usually in a 1:1 fashion, but not always. The latter table specifies features that alter the metrics of glyphs, or the inter-glyph metrics (aka kerning).

The focus of this particular article will be the 'vert' (Vertical Alternates) feature, which substitutes a glyph with the appropriate glyph for vertical writing, and is invoked when in vertical writing mode. In other words, it’s a GSUB feature, and one that needs to be invoked for proper vertical writing. Current implementations that support the 'vert' GSUB feature, which tend to be CJK fonts, substitute glyphs with their vertical forms on a 1:1 basis, though language-tagging may affect the outcome for Pan-CJK fonts, such as the Adobe-branded Source Han Sans and the Google-branded Noto Sans CJK, which support multiple languages.
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