Soon To Open: Plane 3, the Tertiary Ideographic Plane

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Guess what.

🤔

Plane 2, the SIP (Supplementary Ideographic Plane), is almost full.

Right off the bat, in Unicode Version 3.1 (March of 2001), Extension B filled it nearly two-thirds of the way with its 42,711 characters, along with 542 CJK Compatibility Ideographs. Extension C with 4,149 characters was added in Version 5.2 (October of 2009), Extension D with a mere 222 characters was added in Version 6.0 (October of 2010), and Extension E with 5,762 characters was added in Version 8.0 (June of 2015). On tap for Unicode Version 10, scheduled for a June of 2017 release, is Extension F that currently includes 7,473 characters (U+2CEB0 through U+2EBE0).
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“One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish”

Posted on April 17, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

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:


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Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!

Posted on April 16, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Actually, we do.

As pointed out in Matthew Rechs‘ recent and excellent Typekit Blog article about Unicode’s Adopt a Character campaign, these badges were designed by the very talented Jake Giltsoff of the Typekit team at Adobe. Mine for U+1F421 🐡 BLOWFISH is shown above.
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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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Introducing “LOCL Test”

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Inspired by the font that I prepared for and referenced in the previous article, I decided to launch a dedicated open source project for this useful test font, LOCL Test.

Enjoy!

🐡

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:


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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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