Posts in Category "Unicode"

Standardized Variants—Part 2

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

To continue from the December 26, 2012 article, I should first point out that there is a relationship between these 1,002 proposed standardized variants and IVSes (Ideographic Variation Sequences). Standardized variants are standardized, hence their name. IVSes, on the other hand, are registered via a process that is described in UTS #37 and administered by the IVD Registrar (which happens to me at the moment).
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Standardized Variants—Part 1

Posted on December 26, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (2)

One problem that has been plaguing CJK Compatibility Ideographs is the fact that they are adversely affected by normalization. Regardless of which of the four normalization forms is applied—NFC, NFD, NFKC, or NFKD—they are converted to their canonical equivalents, which are CJK Unified Ideographs. This is a problem, particularly for Japan, because 75 kanji in JIS X 0213:2004 kanji map to CJK Compatibility Ideograph code points. Furthermore, 57 of these 75 kanji correspond to Jinmei-yō Kanji (人名用漢字), meaning that they are used for personal names. The bottom-line problem with CJK Compatibility Ideographs is that any application of normalization, by any process, will permanently remove any distinctions between a CJK Compatibility Ideograph and its canonical equivalent. Not all processes are under one’s direct control, meaning that it is impossible to guarantee that normalization will not be applied. My opinion is that it is prudent to assume that normalization will be applied, and that preemption is the best solution.
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Old Hangul—Redux

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

In the December 4, 2012 Old Hangul article I mentioned that the ‘ccmp’ GSUB feature that is referenced in Microsoft’s Developing OpenType Fonts for Korean Hangul Script document is not necessary. Jaemin Chung kindly pointed out to me that environments that do not yet support Unicode Version 5.2 still require the ‘ccmp‘ (Glyph Composition/Decomposition) GSUB feature to be present, otherwise proper shaping will not happen.

The main purpose of this short article is to provide a revised Perl script, named mkoldhangul-ccmp.pl, that adds a complete ‘ccmp’ GSUB feature definition for environments that do not yet support Unicode Version 5.2 (or greater). The sample glyph-map.txt datafile that maps the Unicode-based glyph names to CIDs is unchanged.

Old Hangul

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Okay. It is time to put some “K” into CJK…

Seriously, much of the content of this blog has been focused on Chinese and Japanese issues. This article will provide some much-deserved Korean content.

I spent the last few days coming to grips with Old Hangul (옛한글 yethangeul), specifically how to implement proper shaping using the three registered OpenType GSUB features, ‘ljmo‘ (Leading Jamo Forms), ‘vjmo‘ (Vowel Jamo Forms), and ‘tjmo‘ (Trailing Jamo Forms).
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These are a few of my favorite things…

Posted on November 1, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

I like ASCII. Do I like ASCII because of all the wonderful things one can do with its extraordinarily large repertoire of 94 printable characters? Actually, yes. Before I defend that answer, I’d like to point out that ASCII has three important strengths: simplicity, robustness, and ubiquity. In other words, ASCII is simple in that it has a relatively small number of characters; it forms a subset of virtually every encoding, Unicode or otherwise; and is supported everywhere. In fact, ASCII can be used to represent Unicode through the use of notations. Richard Ishida‘s excellent Unicode Code Converter is an excellent way to explore the various notations that are currently in use.
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URO

Posted on September 16, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

The first set of ideographs to be encoded in Unicode (Version 1.1), which are referred to as CJK Unified Ideographs, are also referred to as the URO, which is an abbreviation for Unified Repertoire and Ordering. None of the other extensions are given this label. Extensions A through D have been standardized, and Extension E will soon be standardized. Only Extension A is in the BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane). Extension B and beyond are in Plane 2, which is called the SIP (Supplementary Ideographic Plane). What makes the URO special or unique?
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Glyph Corrections Via AFDKO Tools—Redux

Posted on August 31, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

As described in the August 24, 2012 article, I am currently updating most of our OpenType Japanese fonts. One aspect of the update is to include the 32 additional IVSes, based on the March 2, 2012 version of the IVD (Ideographic Variation Database), which means that all of the kanji in Adobe-Japan1-6 now have a “plain text” representation. Another aspect of this particular update is to use the latest UTF-32 CMap resources, which include three additional mappings, one of which is U+9FCC that was appended to the URO (Unified Repertoire & Ordering) in Unicode Version 6.1. But, the topic of this article is about fixing a small number of glyphs, and the techniques that I used to do so.
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IMUG = International Multilingual User Group

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Founded in 1987 by Yuan Ho and Seth Schneider, IMUG (International Multilingual User Group) has become Silicon Valley’s best user group for all matters related to internationalization, localization, and globalization. Meeting once a month, usually the third Thursday, IMUG meetings include a presentation by a distinguished member of the internationalization, localization, or globalization community. Adobe began hosting IMUG meetings in 2010 for odd-numbered months, and its Globalization Engineering Council serves as the official host. Even-numbered months are hosted by Google.

Regardless of whether you reside in the San Francisco Bay Area, I encourage you to attend IMUG meetings. Those that are hosted by Adobe are broadcasted via Adobe Connect, meaning that attendees need not be on site.

It seems that I have presented for IMUG six times, in 1995 (Adobe Systems’ CID-Keyed Fonts For Large Character Sets), 1999 (Adventures in Multilingual Publishing), 2005 (The Adobe-Japan1-6 Character Collection), 2008 (Ideographic Variation Sequences: Implementation Details), 2010 (Kazuraki: Adobe Systems’ Groundbreaking New Japanese Typeface), and 2011 (The Power of “Plain Text” & the Importance of Meaningful Content).

The next IMUG meeting, which will be hosted at Adobe, will include an intriguing presentation by Microsoft’s Michael Kaplan, which will be about new internationalization features in Windows 8, scheduled to be released on October 26, 2012, which is, by the way, approximately two months before our world ends. Please plan to attend, either in person or via Adobe Connect.

Minor Adobe-Japan1-6 Unicode CMap Resource Update

Posted on August 13, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Many thanks to Nozomu KATŌ (加藤望) for bringing to my attention that the Adobe-Japan1-6 Unicode CMap resources were missing the following mapping:

U+207F → CID+15908

I decided to add this mapping to the following eight Adobe-Japan1-6 Unicode CMap resources this evening:

UniJIS-UTF8-H
UniJIS-UTF16-H
UniJIS-UTF32-H
UniJIS2004-UTF8-H
UniJIS2004-UTF16-H
UniJIS2004-UTF32-H
UniJISX0213-UTF32-H
UniJISX02132004-UTF32-H

The eight updated CMap resources were just posted to the CMap Resources open source project that is hosted at Open @ Adobe, and the details are in the associated forum post.

Enjoy!

CFR Support in Mac OS X Version 10.8 (Mountain Lion)

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

On July 25, 2012, Apple released to the world Mac OS X Version 10.8 (aka Mountain Lion). Among the many new features in this latest iteration of Mac OS X is support for CFR objects. For those who are not aware, CFR objects are based on ISO/IEC 14496-28:2012 (Composite Font Representation), and are used to define both composite fonts and fallback fonts. CFR objects effectively break the 64K glyph barrier. Mac OS X Version 10.8 is thus the first implementation that has broken the 64K glyph barrier.
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