Posts in Category "Type"

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.
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August 2, 2016—A Date Which Will Live In Dignity

Posted on August 1, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (2)

August 2, 2016 is the official release date for Microsoft’s Windows 10 Anniversary Update (aka Redstone or RS1). Although I do not use Windows OS, I am jumping for joy, for the benefit of those who do use this modern and world-class OS.

Thanks to our friends at Microsoft, the DirectWrite that ships with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update supports OpenType/CFF Collections (aka OTCs), such as those deployed as part of the Adobe-branded Source Han Sans and Google-branded Noto Sans CJK open source projects, to include their all-inclusive “one font to rule them all” Super OTCs.


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Introducing “Width Test”

Posted on April 12, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

It seems that I am on roll, having released two new open source fonts on GitHub within the past week. The previous—and brief—article that was about the LOCL Test OpenType/CFF font simply pointed to the repository. This article will be longer. I promise.
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Hong Kong or Bust!—Redux

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

Although this article shares its title with an article from four years ago that was about the excitement associated with attending ATypI Hong Kong 2012, this particular one will focus on efforts to properly support Hong Kong SAR (aka HK or Hong Kong) in the Adobe-branded Source Han Sans and Google-branded Noto Sans CJK typeface families, but also in infrastructure, such as OSes and apps.

In other words, this article is not about traveling to Hong Kong, but rather about properly supporting Hong Kong in OSes, apps, and fonts.
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The Joy of tx

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

One of the most powerful font-development tools available today is tx (Type eXchange), which is included in AFDKO (Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType) and whose sources are also available on GitHub. Despite its two-letter name, this command-line utility is packed with an enormous amount of features and functionality.

Four years ago I wrote a similar article, but it seems like a good time to revisit tx and the useful things that it can do. I still recommend that its “-u” and -h” command-line options be used to explore its vast capabilities.
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“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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