I’d like to use this opportunity to welcome the year of the dog, which is expressed using the CJK Unified Ideograph 戌 (U+620C), and to wish a Happy Chinese New Year to all of my friends, colleagues, and blog readers who are celebrating this holiday. May this year be safe, prosperous, and enjoyable.
Continue reading…
Today is Friday, July 1st, 2016, which is a date that has a special significance for me. I am publishing this from Hot Springs, South Dakota where I am enjoying a few days away from work.
My life was put on a new path exactly 25 years ago, on Monday, July 1st, 1991. I was 25 years old at the time, and I am therefore 50 years old now. It was on this date that I started working at Adobe as a member of its Type Development team. My employee number is 879, though at the time there were approximately 500 employees in total. It was a much smaller company back then. As you can see from my very first business card below, I was involved in things related to Japanese type from the very beginning:
This event effectively launched a 25-year career that is still going strong, and which has been in the same department doing essentially the same thing, though the technologies and related standards have changed or evolved.
The rest of this somewhat lengthy article will be used to highlight some of my accomplishments during each five-year period.
Continue reading…
That’s the title of the eleventh episode of the second season of The Simpsons which originally aired in early 1991.
This article will instead be about the history and evolution of the blowfish image that graces the cover of my books that were published by O’Reilly Media. The following is the first paragraph of the Colophon of CJKV Information Processing, Second Edition:
On Thursday, December 3rd of 2015, a great man—and a man of faith—passed from our world to the next. Professor Edward Daub, my mentor and youngest son’s namesake, passed away at the age of 91.
Continue reading…
In the realm of CJK Unified Ideographs, there is always talk about no more characters to encode, or that any new characters are simply unifiable variants. This is, in large part, merely wishful thinking.
In my experience, there are three important words to embrace: Never Say Never.
Continue reading…
When transliterating Japanese text using Latin characters, there are three systems or methods for doing so. Of these, the Hepburn system (ヘボン式 hebon shiki) is the most commonly used one, and differs in one important way: long vowels are represented with a macron (U+00AF MACRON or U+0304 COMBINING MACRON) diacritic. Almost all signage in Japan that includes transliterated text, such as in train and subway stations, uses the Hepburn system. However, if we look back to the 1990s and earlier, it was not common to include glyphs for macroned vowels in fonts, whether they were for Latin or Japanese use.
The two other systems, the Kunrei system (訓令式 kunrei shiki) and the Nippon system (日本式 nippon shiki), represent long vowels with a circumflex (U+005E CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT or U+0302 COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT) diacritic. It was common for Latin fonts to include glyphs for circumflexed vowels, meaning U+00C2/U+00E2 (Ââ), U+00CA/U+00EA (Êê), U+00CE/U+00EE (Îî), U+00D4/U+00F4 (Ôô), and U+00DB/U+00FB (Ûû), by virtue of being included in ISO/IEC 8859-1 (aka Latin 1). However, due to limitations of Shift-JIS encoding, even Japanese fonts did not include glyphs for these characters.
Continue reading…
I spent approximately two weeks in August of 2004 developing a radical/stroke database for the 14,664 kanji in Adobe-Japan1-6 (CIDs 656, 1125–7477, 7633–7886, 7961–8004, 8266, 8267, 8284, 8285, 8359–8717, 13320–15443, 16779–20316, and 21071–23057), which is available as a tab-delimited text file that is keyed by Adobe-Japan1-6 CIDs, and as a PDF file that is keyed by indexing radical, then by the number of strokes of the indexing radical instance, followed by the number of remaining strokes, and finally by Adobe-Japan1-6 CID.
Continue reading…
Unicode has become the preferred way in which to represent text in digital form, and for good reason. Its broad coverage of our planet’s scripts and languages is the single greatest reason why this has happened. All of the major OSes have embraced Unicode. In other words, if you develop a product that makes use of text data, and if it doesn’t support Unicode, you’re doing something wrong.
Unicode comes in a variety of representations called encoding forms. The three most basic Unicode encoding forms are UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. The latter two are also available in explicit little- or big-endian flavors: UTF-16LE, UTF-16BE, UTF-32LE, and UTF-32BE. These are covered in Chapter 4 of CJK Information Processing, Second Edition. But, there are times when a bomb-proof way of representing Unicode characters is needed, or when an otherwise ASCII-only web document requires the occasional Unicode characters. For these purposes, and in the context of web documents, Numeric Character References (aka, NCRs) have great advantages. One of the advantages is its human-readability in terms of conveying an explicit Unicode code point. Another advantage is that only ASCII characters are used for this notation, which is its bomb-proof aspect.
Continue reading…
Thanks to an excellent suggestion from Taichi Kawabata (川幡太一), the 2012-03-02 version of the IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) includes three IVD Code Charts, which were released today. The two earlier versions of the IVD—2007-12-14 and 2010-11-14—included only one IVD Code Chart, named IVD_Charts.pdf.
Continue reading…
I have been attending the Internationalization & Unicode Conference (aka, IUC) every year for the past several years, and I typically deliver a presentation (or two) during the two-day conference proper. I was given the opportunity to present about an intriguing and forward-looking topic at IUC35 last October that I entitled Genuine Han Unification (click on the title to view the presentation slides).
Continue reading…
