CMap Resource Updates & Change Policies

Posted on May 24, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

For those font developers who are not aware, the official CMap resource repository for our public ROSes is the CMap Resources open source project at Open @ Adobe, which is hosted by SourceForge. When CMap resources are updated, in addition to providing the updates through this portal, an announcement is made in the CMap Resources Forum.

The UTF-16 and UTF-32 CMap resources were introduced in August of 2001, beginning with Adobe-CNS1-4. Those for Adobe-Korea1-2 and Adobe-Japan2-0 followed in January of 2002, followed by those for Adobe-GB1-4 in June of the same year. The UTF-16 and UTF-32 CMap resources for Adobe-Japan1-5 were not released until November of 2002. From that point, the UCS-2 CMap resources were deprecated, and were no longer updated. Clients that used the UCS-2 CMap resources were encouraged to use the UTF-16 or UTF-32 ones instead. For OpenType font development, in terms of building the Unicode (Format 4 and 12) ‘cmap‘ subtables, the UTF-32 CMap resources are recommended.
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Adobe-Japan1-6 Unicode Version 6.1 Tables

Posted on May 23, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Years ago, I wrote a Perl script, called unicode-rows.pl, that takes a fully-qualified PostScript name—composed of a CIDFont resource name, two hyphens, and a UTF-32 CMap resource name—then generates a PostScript file that can be distilled into a PDF. The resulting PDF file is a Unicode table, arranged in groups of 256 code points. If the UTF-32 CMap resource includes even a single mapping for a particular group of 256 code points, a page is created.

I have prepared examples that are based on the UniJIS2004-UTF32-H and UniJIS-UTF32-H CMap resources.
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“All Of Unicode” CFR Object

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

As alluded to at the end of the May 9, 2012 CJK Type Blog article, I had plans to build additional CFR objects for testing purposes. That particular article supplied two 64K-glyph OpenType/CFF fonts, which provided BMP and Plane 1 coverage, and served as component fonts for the supplied CFR object, UnicodeGetaCFR.cfr. In today’s article, I will supply a CFR object that encompasses all of Unicode, meaning the BMP and the 16 Supplementary Planes, along with the component fonts that it references. In other words, coverage for 1,112,030 code points, each of which has a unique glyph. These represent valuable testing resources for developers who plan to support CFR objects in their products as a way to break the 64K glyph barrier.
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A very useful AFDKO ‘tx’ tool command line…

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

For those AFDKO users who use, plan to use, or would like to explore the broad capabilities of its tx tool, here’s a command line that is very useful when building new versions of existing fonts, especially when only a small number of glyphs have changed:

% tx -bc -sha1 -z 400 <font_file>

The <font_file> portion of the command line can be any type of font file, such as an OpenType font, a CFF resource, a CIDFont resource, or a name-keyed Type 1 font.
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Building a CID-keyed font with 64K glyphs & 256 FDArray elements

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

As mentioned at the end of the May 15, 2012 CJK Type Blog article, I will demonstrate in this article how to build a CID-keyed font with 64K glyphs (CIDs 0 through 65534) and 256 FDArray elements. These represent two limits that are inherent in CIDFont resources.

Again, the incredibly powerful AFDKO mergeFonts tool will perform most of the work.
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Building a CID-keyed font with 64K glyphs

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Today, I want to demonstrate how the AFDKO mergeFonts tool can be used to quickly and easily build a CID-keyed font that includes 64K glyphs, meaning CIDs 0 through 65534. This is the maximum number of glyphs that a CIDFont resource can contain. This font, of course, will use the special-purpose Adobe-Identity-0 ROS, and although its is a CID-keyed font, it will include only one FDArray element.
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The Special-Purpose Adobe-Identity-0 ROS

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Adobe has thus far released two CID-keyed OpenType/CFF fonts that use the special-purpose Adobe-Identity-0 ROS (“ROS” is an abbreviation for /Registry, /Ordering, and /Supplement, which represent the three /CIDSystemInfo dictionary elements that are present in CIDFont and CMap resources): Kazuraki SP2N L (かづらき SP2N L) and Kenten Generic. The former is a commercial OpenType/CFF font, and the latter is an open source one. I have also developed several Adobe-Identity-0 ROS OpenType/CFF fonts for testing purposes, many of which have been provided in recent CJK Type Blog articles, the most recent of which being the May 9th, 2012 article.

The big question that may be on a font developer’s mind is under what circumstances is it appropriate to use the Adobe-Identity-0 ROS?
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Towards Breaking The 64K Glyph Barrier…

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

In the April 20, 2012 CJK Type Blog article, I wrote about the publishing of ISO/IEC 14496-28:2012 (Composite Font Representation), which provides a venue for breaking the 64K glyph barrier that is inherent in all sfnt-based font formats, including name- and CID-keyed PostScript fonts. If the number of glyphs of the combined component fonts that are referenced by a CFR object exceed 64K, would constitute breaking the 64K glyph barrier.
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Making “Character Codes” Look Better

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

In my work, I need to deal with character codes on a regular basis, such as Unicode scalar values and hexadecimal values for legacy encodings. This includes writing documents that include them. For most purposes, especially when used in tables, tabular figures work best because they are monospaced. Of course, one could simply choose to use a monospaced font. But, unless a different font is actually desired for character codes, using the same typeface design is usually preferred, because it better matches the surrounding text. The issue is that very few, if any, fonts include tabular glyphs that support hexadecimal notation, specifically referring to ‘A’ through ‘F’ (or ‘a’ through ‘f’ for lowercase). Luckily, I was able to solve this particular dilemma.
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Never Say Never

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (2)

In the realm of CJK Unified Ideographs, there is always talk about no more characters to encode, or that any new characters are simply unifiable variants. This is, in large part, merely wishful thinking.

In my experience, there are three important words to embrace: Never Say Never.
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