Posts in Category "Standards"

Resurrecting L2/14-006

Posted on January 29, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

This article is largely a test, but also serves to start the process of resurrecting L2/14-006 (Proposal to add standardized variation sequences for nine characters) for discussion at UTC #151 in early May.

Liang Hai (梁海) brought up this document for discussion at UTC #150 last week, and while I had an opportunity to have it accepted by the UTC, to be included in Unicode Version 10.0 (June, 2017), I decided that it was prudent to instead prepare a revised proposal that is more complete, mainly because L2/14-006 was submitted and discussed prior to the first release of the Adobe-branded Source Han Sans and Google-branded Noto Sans CJK Pan-CJK typeface families. This functionality was implemented in those typeface families via the 'locl' GSUB feature, which requires the text to be language-tagged. In other words, I learned a lot since L2/14-006 was discussed, and prefer to submit a more complete proposal, even if it means waiting for Unicode Version 11.0 (June, 2018).
Continue reading…

Year of the Rooster

Posted on January 27, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

It is now January 28, 2017 in China and other Chinese-speaking regions.

I’d like to use this opportunity to welcome the Year of the Rooster, and to wish a Chinese New Year to all of my Chinese friends, colleagues, and blog readers. May this year be safe, prosperous, and enjoyable.
Continue reading…

The Tale of U+27BF & Adobe-Japan1-6 CID+20958

Posted on January 22, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

As recorded in The Adobe-Japan-6 Character Collection, it was released on 2004-03-05, and one of the glyphs that was added was CID+20958. According to the Adobe-Japan1-6 ordering file, its glyph name is freedial, and is assigned to the Dingbats FDArray element for the purpose of hinting. Of course, if you look for CID+20958 in Adobe Tech Note #5078, you can find it on the bottom of page 54, immediately to the right of CID+20957 that maps from U+26BD ⚽ SOCCER BALL, though it is blank. This is simply because Adobe does not have the rights to use NTT’s trademarked FreeDial mark. CID+20958 was included in Adobe-Japan1-6 for the benefit of font developers who do have the rights to use this mark, and can thus include the glyph in their fonts.
Continue reading…

UTC #150

Posted on January 13, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

UTC #150, the 150th Unicode Technical Committee meeting, takes place later this month, from 2017-01-23 through 2017-01-26, and will be hosted by our friends at Apple in Sunnyvale, California. I will attend as Adobe’s representative. As usual, there will be CJK- and IRG-related items to discuss. One item will be the UTC’s review of IRG Working Set 2015 Version 3.0 (aka CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G), L2/17-006, which I recently finished.

A major focus of UTC #150 will be Unicode Version 10.0, which is scheduled to be released in June of this year. Unicode Version 10.0 will include 21 additional characters appended to the URO (Unified Repertoire & Ordering), along with Extension F (7,473 characters), as shown here.

While we’re on the subject of Unicode, be sure to explore the sidebar on the right side of this blog’s landing page, which includes links to several useful Unicode-related resources.

🐡

Combining Jamo Test #3

Posted on December 2, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Unlike the first and second similarly-titled articles that I published last month, this article will focus on a minor efficiency for the combining jamo feature of the Adobe-branded Source Han Sans and Google-branded Noto Sans CJK Pan-CJK typeface families.
Continue reading…

New For Unicode Version 10.0: Hentaigana—変体仮名

Posted on November 22, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

Prior to Japan’s script reform of 1900, there was more than one shape associated with each syllable of the hiragana syllabary. There is now only one shape associated with each syllable. The now-obsolete and nonstandard shapes are referred to as hentaigana (変体仮名), which simply means variant kana. Hentaigana are still in use today in Japan, but are limited to Japan’s family registry (戸籍 koseki in Japanese) and specialized uses, such as business signage and other decor that are specifically designed to convey a feeling of nostalgia or traditional charm.

In addition to the Wikipedia article that is linked from the previous paragraph, 『変体仮名のこれまでとこれから—情報交換のための標準化』 (The past, present, and future of hentaigana: Standardization for information processing) by TAKADA Tomokazu (高田智和) et al. and About the inclusion of standardized codepoints for Hentaigana by YADA Tsutomu (矢田勉) serve as excellent reading material.
Continue reading…

Combining Jamo Test #2—Please Ignore

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

To (significantly) expand yesterday’s super exciting article, and in the continued interest of (stress-)testing the extent to which combining jamo works in various browsers—and when being served as a fully-functional webfont via Adobe Typekit—if you click here, you will open a 40MB HTML file that includes all 1,626,875 possible three-character combining jamo sequences (125 leading consonants, 95 vowels, and 137 trailing consonants) rendered using Adobe Clean Han and its 'ljmo' (Leading Jamo Forms), 'vjmo' (Vowel Jamo Forms), and 'tjmo' (Trailing Jamo Forms) GSUB features.

🐡

Combining Jamo Test #1—Please Ignore

Posted on November 3, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

In the interest of testing the extent to which combining jamo works in various browsers—and when being served as a fully-functional webfont via Adobe Typekit—if you click here, you will open a 200K HTML file that includes all 11,875 possible two-character combining jamo sequences (125 leading consonants and 95 vowels) rendered using Adobe Clean Han and its 'ljmo' (Leading Jamo Forms), 'vjmo' (Vowel Jamo Forms), and 'tjmo' (Trailing Jamo Forms) GSUB features.

🐡

Standards 101

Posted on September 13, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Attention, students! Class is in session.

In my experience, the following two statements about standards are seemingly conflicting yet accurate:

  1. Standards are incredibly useful—and required—for product development.
  2. Standards cannot be completely trusted.

On one hand, developing products, such as typeface designs and their fonts, depends on standards.

On the other hand, standards themselves are developed by humans, meaning that they are prone to error, especially when they happen to be character set or glyph standards that include thousands or tens of thousands of representative glyphs.
Continue reading…

UTC #148, Extension F & Unicode Version 10.0

Posted on August 6, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

UTC #148 took place in Redmond, Washington last week, hosted by our friends at Microsoft. It was a four-day working meeting, and many important Unicode-related issues and proposals were discussed. A total of 7,888 new characters were formally accepted into the standard during this meeting. Among them were the 7,473 CJK Unified Ideographs of Extension F, along with the lone CJK Unified Ideograph U+9FEA that is appended to the URO (Unified Repertoire & Ordering) and is the result of the disunification of 㸂 U+3E02, which were accepted on 2016-08-04 for inclusion into Unicode Version 10.0. Version 10.0 is slated for a June 2017 release. This means that my table above is now less tentative (clicking on the image will reveal the entire PDF file that includes details about the unchanged CJK Compatibility Ideographs).

Other CJK Unified Ideographs that are slated to be included in Unicode Version 10.0 are the 20 characters, U+9FD6 through U+9FE9, which were accepted on 2014-10-28 (UTC #141).

This will bring the total number of CJK Unified Ideographs to 87,882, and as the table at the top of this article suggests, there is not much room left in Plane 2, and Extension G is just around the corner.

😱

For those who are curious about the 414 other new characters that were accepted during UTC #148, please click here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

🐡