Unicode | CJK Type Blog

Posts in Category "Unicode"

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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Something fell between the cracks!

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

A peculiar series of events that took place on April 1st (no joke) and 2nd of this year led to the discovery of what can only be described as somewhat of a revelation: A small number of CJK Compatibility Ideographs are necessary for China. This is important, because I made the following statement on page 168 of CJKV Information Processing, Second Edition:

“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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The Experimental “PanCJKV” IVD Collection

Posted on February 13, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (2)

One of my longer term goals for the open source Source Han Sans project has been to eventually register a Pan-CJK IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) collection that would allow the regional variants to display and be preserved in “plain text” environments, and I think that I may have achieved a breakthrough the other day.
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“My God, it’s full of stars! And turtles and dragons!”

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

CJK Unified Ideographs is a very deep and fascinating subject, and there are people who sometimes— and anecdotally—claim that it is a bottomless pit (or infinite tunnel, hence the quote in this article’s title). The latter may appear to be accurate, especially when one considers what is happening on that front, such as Extension F with its 7,473 new characters slated for Unicode Version 10.0 in June of 2017, and with work on Extension G commencing.
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Year of the Monkey