CJK Type Blog

The Adobe-Japan1-6 Character Collection, which has become the de facto glyph set for today’s mainstream OpenType Japanese fonts, celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. This glyph set began its life in 1992, as Adobe-Japan1-0 (Supplement 0). Given that I have been at Adobe longer than 20 years, and was involved in the development of this glyph set, I will use this opportunity to detail some of its history, at least as seen through my eyes.
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When developing CID-keyed OpenType/CFF fonts that are based on one of our public ROSes—meaning Adobe-GB1-5, Adobe-CNS1-6, Adobe-Japan1-6, or Adobe-Korea1-2 (including their earlier Supplements)—it is a good idea to leverage existing resources. One of these resources are the registered GSUB (Glyph SUBstitution) features that we define when building OpenType/CFF fonts that are based on these ROSes. Of course, if you build an OpenType/CFF font based on the special-purpose Adobe-Identity-0 ROS, you’re pretty much on your own in terms of defining its GSUB features, but this CJK Type Blog post from earlier this month demonstrated how existing GSUB features for our public ROSes can be used as the basis for such fonts.
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Two of our font- and CJK-related Adobe Tech Notes were updated this week. One aspect of the update is for issuing a new Supplement or to correct representative glyphs. Another aspect is to typeset the document according to latest practices. For these Adobe Tech Notes, the latter aspect involved changing their static glyph tables into a form that is more efficient, more useful, and more dynamic.
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Given that I seem to be on a roll, it seems appropriate to begin a new AFDKO series that focuses on the all-important “features” file that is used to define GSUB and GPOS features, and to override the settings of various tables. Let’s begin with something relatively simple, such as overriding the ‘vmtx‘ table for a very specific class of glyphs: full-width Latin or Latin-like glyphs that rest on a Latin baseline, but which should be centered along the Y-axis when in vertical writing mode. Click here to download an archive that includes the various files and resources that are referenced in this article.
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In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I demonstrated how AFDKO tools can be used to convert name-keyed fonts into CID-keyed ones. Part 1 resulted in a font that uses the special-purpose Adobe-Identity-0 ROS, and Part 2 resulted in one that uses a standard character collection, specifically the Adobe-Japan1-0 ROS.

Part 3 in this series will demonstrate how GSUB features—using the ‘vert‘ GSUB feature as an example—can be added to both types of fonts. Click here to download an archive that includes the various files and resources that are referenced in this article.
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Part 2 of this series will demonstrate how AFDKO tools can be used to specify multiple FDArray elements (aka, hint dictionaries) when converting name-keyed fonts into CID-keyed ones. The same technique can be used to convert a CID-keyed font with a single FDArray element into one with multiple FDArray elements.

The sample font in Part 1 of this series does not have enough script “richness” to demonstrate this technique, so I crafted a different sample font for demonstration purposes. Again, the technique is easily scalable, and can thus handle thousands or tens of thousands of glyphs.
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The easiest method for representing an arbitrary name-keyed OpenType font as a CID-keyed one is to specify the special-purpose Adobe-Identity-0 ROS (/Registry, /Ordering, and /Supplement, referring to the three elements of the /CIDSystemInfo dictionary that is present in CIDFont resource headers), and in my experience, the easiest path to conversion is to leverage specific AFDKO tools, such as tx, mergeFonts, stemHist, autohint, and makeotf. As you should discover after reading this article, the conversion process is relatively straight-forward and simple.

The first part in this series will focus on the basic conversion process, from name-keyed to CID-keyed, ignoring any OpenType features that were present in the original name-keyed OpenType font, and also not taking advantage of multiple FDArray elements (aka, hint dictionaries) that are possible in CID-keyed fonts. Subsequent parts in this series will cover those topics.
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I realized today, thanks to a tweet by @mashabow, that we have never fully documented the “cidfontinfo” file.

This file started out as the primary control file for our first-generation CIDFont resource compiler, called mkcidfont, which ran only on SunOS.
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One question that I am often asked by OpenType CJK font developers is related to the XUID array, which is used by some environments for caching purposes. I decided to use this opportunity to write a brief tutorial on how to manage XUID arrays when developing OpenType CJK fonts.
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