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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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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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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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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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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Although I am a couple days late, I’d like to use this opportunity to welcome the year of the monkey, and to wish a Chinese New Year to all of my Chinese friends, colleagues, and blog readers. May this year be safe, prosperous, and enjoyable.
🍷
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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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.
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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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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