Collections… …of the OpenType/CFF Variety

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

Let it be known that the “OpenType Collection” (OTC) format was born on 09/21/2011 at Pho Minh Restaurant in Cupertino, California. Present from Adobe were the following: David Lemon, Ken Lunde, Sairus Patel, and Read Roberts. Present from Apple were Antonio Cavedoni, Julio Gonzalez, Yasuo Kida, Peter Lofting, and Tony Tseung. — Adobe & Apple

The above declaration paved the way for supporting (CFF-based) OpenType Collections in Apple’s OS X (beginning from Version 10.8) and in Adobe’s applications (beginning from CS6).
Continue reading…

IMUG: The International Multilingual User Group

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

I have been involved with IMUG—this abbreviation originally stood for International Macintosh User Group, but now stands for The International Multilingual User Group—since the early 1990s, presenting in 1993, 1995, 1999, 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2011, but more recently I have been involved with hosting this excellent user group at Adobe.

IMUG is a user group that is intended for GUILT (Globalization, Unicode, Internationalization, Localization & Translation) professionals (some people use GILT instead of the more proper GUILT, perhaps because they forget that Unicode provides the underpinnings for GILT ☺), and their monthly meetings offer plenty of variety. In addition to a presentation from a seasoned professional in this industry, each meeting offers attendees an opportunity to mingle with other like-minded professionals.
Continue reading…

CJK Unified Ideographs in Unicode Version 8.0

Posted on January 10, 2015 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

This is an update to the short article that I wrote last August.

Now that it is officially 2015, and given that Unicode Version 8.0 is scheduled to be released mid-year, exactly what is expected to be included—at least in terms of CJK Unified Ideographs—is becoming clearer. Perusing the still-in-process UCD (Unicode Character Database) sheds much light on this. (I also recommend checking the pipeline from time to time.)

I recently updated the single-page PDF that tallies the CJK Unified Ideographs and CJK Compatibility Ideographs that are in Unicode, to include the latest information for Version 8.0, along with what can be expected to be included in Version 9.0 (mid-2016).

The highlights for Unicode Version 8.0 include nine of the 29 Urgently Needed Characters being appended to the URO (Unified Repertoire & Ordering) and Extension E (5,762 characters). The remaining 20 Urgently Needed Characters, along with Extension F, are expected to be included in Unicode Version 9.0.

Source Han Sans (and Noto Sans CJK) supports the first four of the nine Urgently Needed Characters that are being fast-tracked for Version 8.0, along with 108 Extension E code points for supporting China’s 通用规范汉字表 (Tōngyòng Guīfàn Hànzìbiǎo).

Source Han Sans vs Source Sans Pro & Source Code Pro

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

For those familiar with typeface design, there is no doubt that the Latin and Latin-like glyphs—to include those for Greek and Cyrillic—in Source Han Sans are based on Source Sans Pro. One may also wonder about the half-width Latin glyphs in Source Han Sans and how they compare to those in Source Code Pro. The purpose of this short article is to make these relationships and differences clear, or at least clearer.
Continue reading…

GB 12052-89: PRC Standard For Korean

Posted on December 28, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

While it was not uncommon for early (pre-Unicode) CJK character set standard to include characters that correspond to scripts of other languages or used in other countries, such as the extent to which Japanese kana were included in standards from China and Korea, it was not common for one of these countries to produce a standard for a seemingly different language. Enter GB 12052-89 (entitled Korean Character Coded Character Set for Information Interchange, or 信息交换用朝鲜文字编码字符集 in Chinese), which is a GB (PRC) standard that sort of broke this mold.
Continue reading…

Source Han Sans Development: Archaic Hangul

Posted on December 5, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

One of the reasons why Source Han Sans—and obviously the Google-branded Noto Sans CJK—can be considered the world’s first Pan-CJK typeface family is due to its support for Korean hangul. While it is common to support modern hangul in Korean fonts, supporting archaic hangul is relatively uncommon. One of the more challenging aspects of developing Source Han Sans was implementing support for archaic hangul, which also included handling 500 high-frequency archaic hangul syllables. This article will thus detail what went into supporting archaic hangul in Source Han Sans. I’d like to once again thank our talented friends at Sandoll Communications for designing the glyphs for these characters.
Continue reading…

GB 18030 Oddity or Design Flaw? (Redux)

Posted on November 23, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

As I described in an article earlier this year, GB 18030 artificially imposes a visual difference between Radicals #74 (⽉) and #130 (⾁) for character pairs that differ only in this component, though conventions for Simplified Chinese use a unified form that looks like Radical #74. In that article I pinpointed a case for which the character that uses Radical #130 is in error, because its left-side radical uses the Radical #74 form, and the corresponding character that uses Radical #74 is outside the scope of GB 18030 (at least for now).

Thanks to Jaemin Chung, I was able to find three errors within the scope of GB 18030, as shown below:

According to the principles imposed by GB 18030, the characters on the left are in error, and should be visually distinct from those on the right in terms of their left-side radical.
Continue reading…

East Asia Tour 2014

Posted on November 8, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

For the first time in my life, I visited three East Asian countries in a single trip: China, South Korea, and Japan. I have had trips that involved two countries—South Korea & Japan, China & South Korea—but never three. This particular one was also done in the span of only one week.

The purpose of this trip was to visit the three type foundries who were involved in the Source Han Sans/Noto Sans CJK project: Changzhou SinoType (常州华文) in Changzhou, China; Iwata (イワタ) in Tōkyō, Japan; and Sandoll Communications (산돌커뮤니케이션) in Seoul, South Korea. In addition to thanking each company in person, we also used the opportunity to discuss particulars of the project, in terms of what worked well and what didn’t, and I also demonstrated the processes that I used to take their raw glyph data and turn it into the final fonts. All three companies gave us a warm welcome, and were very gracious hosts. We had excellent lunches and dinners with all three companies, which allowed for greater social interaction.

Masataka HATTORI (服部正貴) from our Tōkyō office traveled with me to China and South Korea, and Jinho KANG from our Seoul office participated in the meeting with Sandoll Communications. In addition to Masataka, Taro YAMAMOTO (山本太郎) participated in the meeting with Iwata.
Continue reading…

IUC38 Presentations

Posted on November 5, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

This week’s festivities have thus far included attending IUC38 in Santa Clara, California. I presented twice, both times about Source Han Sans and Noto Sans CJK development.

For those who were unable to attend this excellent conference, the slides for my two presentations, Developing & Deploying The World’s First Open Source Pan-CJK Typeface Family and Building Source Han Sans & Noto Sans CJK, are now available.

Enjoy!

P.S. The image shown above, which was used on page 47 of my first presentation to describe the Super OTC deployment configuration, became popular during IUC38, and was used by at least three other presentations. ☺

Source Han Slate

Posted on October 17, 2014 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

In the spirit of team-building and developing new skills, my manager, David Lemon, invited Chris Stinehour of Christopher Stinehour Design to give the Adobe Type Team a two-day workshop on letter cutting in stone. The workshop took place on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. The result of my efforts, which most definitely involved learning a new skill, is shown below:


Continue reading…