Posts in Category "Unicode"

Discovering Historical Gems

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

One of the fringe benefits of moving offices—especially when one has accumulated nearly 25 years of font-related material and it is thus not a pain-free exercise—is discovering historical documents, some of which turn out to be true gems. Our team is preparing to move from the Adobe East Tower to the West one, and part of the process is figuring which material to keep, and which to put into File 13. Anyway, I had been recently looking for a particular presentation that I prepared many years ago, and was fortunate enough to come across it while sifting through my accumulated materials.
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An Early Look At Unicode Version 10.0

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

It is with great sadness that I write that Unicode Version 9.0, whose beta was authorized yesterday, on the last day of UTC #146, will include no additional CJK Unified Ideographs. The next opportunity for additional CJK Unified Ideographs is therefore Unicode Version 10.0, which is slated for a June 2017 release, and is expected to include 21 Urgently Needed Characters (UNCs) that are appended to the URO (Unified Repertoire & Ordering), along with Extension F (see IRG N2156 for the latest version) that currently includes 7,473 characters.

Interestingly, and as long as Extension F’s block remains stable, there are only 3,088 code points remaining in Plane 2 (SIP), specifically U+2EBF0 through U+2F7FF, along with 1,502 code points at the end of Plane 2, immediately following CJK Compatibility Ideographs Supplement, specifically U+2FA20 through U+2FFFD.

The image above is an excerpt of a PDF that shows what Unicode Version 10.0 is likely to include in terms of ideographs. If you click on the image, you will get the actual PDF. Of course, the yellow stuff is tentative and subject to change.

Updated on 2016-06-26 to reflect the additional UNC appended to the URO at U+9FEA, along with a net decrease of 12 characters in Extension F, reducing it to 7,473 characters.

🐡

Ideographic Tally Marks

Posted on January 28, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

In late 2015, I collaborated with Daisuke MIURA to submit a proposal (L2/15-328) to the UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) to encode the characters for four tally mark systems. The proposal was discussed during UTC #146, and the result was that the five ideographic tally mark characters were accepted. Good news.

The Script Ad Hoc Committee originally recommended in their report for UTC #146 (see page 9 of L2/15-037) that IDEOGRAPHIC TALLY DIGIT TWO not be encoded, because they felt that it could be unified with U+1D36E (COUNTING ROD TENS DIGIT SIX), but concerns over typographic consistency led to it being accepted as a separate character.
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Unicode’s “Adopt a Character” Campaign

Posted on January 18, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

In December of 2015, Unicode launched their Adopt a Character campaign, whose goal is to raise funding for the purpose of encoding a large number of remaining scripts, along with encoding additional characters for scripts that are already encoded. In other words, to help Unicode do its important work. The Unicode Consortium has 501(c)(3) tax status, meaning that donations are tax-deductible in the US, and if your company supports matching grants, you can leverage that to significantly increase the effective donation.
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What’s in a ‘name’ (Table)?

Posted on November 7, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

By default, the AFDKO makeotf tool includes Macintosh (platformID=1, encodingID=0, languageID=0) ‘name‘ table strings, and if specified in the “FontMenuNameDB” or “features” files, localized Macintosh ‘name’ table strings will also be included. The next release of AFDKO will include “-omitMacNames” as a new command-line option for makeotf whose purpose is to exclude Macintosh ‘name’ table strings, other than any that are explicitly specified in the “features” file.
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IUC39 Presentation

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

IUC39 (The 39th Internationalization & Unicode Conference) took place in Santa Clara earlier this week, and Adobe was once again proud to be a Gold Sponsor. It was another outstanding and successful conference, and as usual, one of the greatest benefits of the conference—besides the many excellent presentations—was the opportunity for face-to-face exchanges with Unicode leaders, experts, and enthusiasts.
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Introducing FDArray Test

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

(The introductory graphic illustrates how the character 剣 (U+5263) is displayed using the fonts that are introduced in this article. The code point for this character maps to a glyph that displays as “63” in the FDArray Test 257 font, which is the hexadecimal equivalent of the decimal index of the FDArray element to which its glyph is assigned, which is 99. Likewise, the code point for this character maps to a glyph that displays as “52” in the FDArray Test 65535 font, which is the hexadecimal equivalent of the decimal index of the FDArray element to which its glyph is assigned, which is 82.)

I have built several CID-keyed OpenType/CFF fonts that are specifically designed to test various limits, by exercising various implementation limits, such as the number of glyphs (65,535 is the architectural limit), the number of FDArray elements (256 is the architectural limit), and the number of mappings in the ‘cmap‘ table (when the surrogates and non-characters are factored out, Unicode has 1,111,998 possible mappings in its 17 planes). I have sometimes made these fonts available, such as in this May of 2012 article that explains how such fonts can be built.

Anyway, I spent pretty much all day yesterday—except for a somewhat longer than usual lunch break that was actually used to watch The Martian (2015) with my wife—preparing a pair of open source CID-keyed OpenType/CFF fonts that exercise these limits but to different degrees, and I also managed to prepare and release the project on GitHub as FDArray Test.
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Two Biángs Are Better Than One

Posted on October 11, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

The Unicode Consortium is planning to once again propose the encoding of the well-attested ideograph whose reading is biáng. Previous attempts at encoding this ideograph have failed due to the lack of sufficient evidence, such as appearing in a dictionary or other printed source. This time, however, there is sufficient evidence, and the simplified form of this ideograph will also be included in the proposal. Both forms, along with their U-Source references UTC-00791 and UTC-01312, are depicted below:

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To V, Or Not To V

Posted on September 8, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Historically, there have been two methods of supporting vertical writing in CID-keyed OpenType/CFF fonts, in terms of specifying the ‘vert‘ (Vertical Alternates) GSUB feature. One method involved using a vertical CMap resource, which was supplied to the AFDKO makeotf tool as an argument to its no-longer-supported “-cv” command-line option, that was used to synthesize the ‘vert’ GSUB feature. The other method, which is the preferred one, involves defining a ‘vert’ GSUB feature in the “features” file that is supplied to the AFDKO makeotf tool. In this brief article, I will explain why the first method is no longer supported, but more importantly, why the second method is preferred.
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IUC39 Preparations

Posted on August 27, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

I am scheduled to present at IUC39 (The 39th Internationalization & Unicode Conference) in late October, and the title of my presentation is Pan-CJK Font Development Techniques, Tips, Tricks & Pitfalls. While the related presentations that I delivered at IUC38 last November focused on actual Source Han Sans and Noto Sans CJK development details, this presentation will be more general, and will instead focus more on techniques and best practices when developing large multilingual fonts, drawing on the experience of developing and deploying those two joined-at-the-hip typeface families when necessary.

I am currently dealing with properly categorizing the various tidbits of the presentation as Techniques, Tips, Tricks, or Pitfalls. I decided to combine Tips and Tricks into the single category Tips & Tricks, because they’re roughly the same, but mainly because I found an excellent image that conveys the meaning of tricks. ☺

Anyway, I still have a lot of work left to do on this presentation, but at least I have another two months to complete it.

As I may have mentioned in past articles, the benefits of this conference go beyond the scheduled presentations, and much of the value is the golden opportunity for face-to-face interaction with developers who are involved in the development of Unicode, or who are working with Unicode on a daily basis.

For those who are planning to attend IUC39, I look forward to meeting you there. 🍷