CJK Type Blog

OpenType SVG Fonts in Creative Cloud Apps

Posted on November 2, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Today’s article provides useful details for our relatively small number of customers who author documents with our flagship Creative Cloud apps and make use of CID-keyed OpenType SVG fonts. A rather broadly-deployed CID-keyed OpenType SVG typeface is the open source Source Han Code JP family, whose development details are described in the very first section of this article.

While it is fully possible to build OpenType fonts—CID-keyed or otherwise—that include an 'SVG ' (Scalable Vector Graphics) table, the infrastructure to support them in apps is still maturing. That is the purpose of this article, so please continue reading if the details interest or otherwise affect you.
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Three Down, One To Go…

Posted on October 15, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Earlier this month, I decided to move the Adobe-Japan1-6 character collection specification to the Adobe Type Tools organization on GitHub, which was partly motivated by constantly-changing URLs on our Font Technical Notes page. Another motivation was to make the specification itself easier to maintain. At some point, I will be adding a more complete list of Supplement 7 (aka Adobe-Japan1-7) candidates to its wiki.

To this end, I decided to do the same for the Adobe-CNS1-7 and Adobe-GB1-5 character collection specifications while on vacation in South Dakota. For the former, I also used the opportunity to update the specification to include Supplement 7 (aka Adobe-CNS1-7), by adding its representative glyphs and other details.

So, that’s three down, and one to go.
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Adobe-Japan1-6 on GitHub

Posted on October 3, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

This is a very brief article whose purpose is to simply state that the Adobe-Japan1-6 character collection specification is now an open source project that is hosted on GitHub as a new repository in the Adobe Type Tools organization.

Most of my morning was consumed by porting the original text from Adobe InDesign to GitHub-flavored Markdown, and, while I was touching the text, I decided to seize the opportunity to make several corrections and updates. The 500-glyphs-per-page representative glyph charts are now in a separate PDF file. I also used the opportunity to update the aj16-kanji.txt datafile, and also added the latest-and-greatest Adobe-Japan1-6 UVS (Unicode Variation Sequence) definition file. All good stuff, I think.

Enjoy!

🐡

A Forthcoming Registry & Ordering: Adobe-KR-6

Posted on October 1, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

It is difficult to imagine that it has been over 20 years since a new RO—or Adobe CID-keyed glyph set—was born. Of course, I am referring to the static glyph sets, not the ones based on the special-purpose Adobe-Identity-0 ROS.

“RO” stands for Registry and Ordering, which represent compatibility names or identifiers for CID-keyed glyph sets that are referred to as character collections. Adobe CID-keyed glyph sets are usually referred to as ROSes, with the final “S” being an integer that refers to a specific Supplement. The first Supplement, of course, is 0 (zero).

One of my recent projects is to revitalize and modernize our Korean glyph set, Adobe-Korea1-2 (see Adobe Tech Note #5093), which was last modified on 1998-10-12 by defining Supplement 2 that added only pre-rotated versions of the proportional and half-width glyphs that are referenced by the effectively-deprecated 'vrt2' (Vertical Alternates and Rotation) GSUB feature. Instead of defining a new Supplement, I decided that it would be better to simply define a completely new glyph set for a variety of reasons. The tentative Registry and Ordering names are Adobe and KR (meaning “Adobe-KR”), and unlike other ROSes for which Supplements are defined incrementally, my current plan is to simultaneously define seven Supplements, 0 through 6.
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Internationalization & Unicode Conferences

Posted on September 22, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

I have attended every Internationalization & Unicode Conference (IUC) since IUC31 in 2007, and Adobe has been a continuous Gold Sponsor since IUC31. Unfortunately, duty calls, in the form of attending and hosting IRG #49 that takes place during the same week as IUC41, which means that I can neither attend nor present this year. Of course, Adobe continues to be a Gold Sponsor of this important event.
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“Houston, we have a problem… …with U+2F9B2”

Posted on September 4, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

U+2F9B2 䕫 is a CJK Compatibility Ideograph, and like all CJK Compatibility Ideographs, it canonically decomposes to a CJK Unified Ideograph, and also has a Standardized Variation Sequence (SVS) that uses its canonical equivalent as its base character. This character also has a single source reference, H-8FA8, which corresponds to HKSCS (Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set) 0x8FA8.

So, what’s the problem? Put simply, its canonical equivalent, U+456B 䕫, is neither in HKSCS nor in its Big Five subset:

If this character is ever normalized—regardless of the normalization form—it is converted to its canonical equivalent, U+456B 䕫, which is not likely to be included in fonts that are designed for use in Hong Kong SAR. Furthermore, even if its SVS, <U+456B,U+FE00>, is used, there is a similar problem in that its base character is also not likely to be present in fonts that are designed for use in Hong Kong SAR.
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Super, Mega & Ultra OTCs

Posted on August 26, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

Per a suggestion by a friend named Leroy, I recently renamed the multiple-style and multiple-family OTCs (OpenType Collections) in this open source repository which includes such OTCs that are based on the Adobe-branded Source Han and Google-branded Noto CJK families. These multiple-style and multiple-family OpenType Collections were described in this article from April of this year. The purpose of this particular article is to introduce better names for them besides Super OTC.

First, some background about Super OTCs…

Shortly after Source Han Sans and Noto Sans CJK were released, I came up with the idea of creating a single OpenType Collection that includes all languages and all weights, and the name Super OTC was coined. This was included in the Version 1.001 update (2014-09-12) as a fourth deployment format for both families, and each one included 28 fonts. These were expanded to 36 fonts when the HW (half-width, ASCII-only) fonts, which covered only the Regular and Bold weights, were added as part of the Version 1.002 update (2015-04-20). Source Han Serif and Noto Serif CJK included a Super OTC in their Version 1.000 release (2017-04-03).
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The Tale of Three PRIs

Posted on August 15, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

There has been a flurry of IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) activity this year.

First, UTS #37 (Unicode Ideographic Variation Database) was updated at the end of January to allow characters with the “Ideographic” property to serve as valid base characters in an IVS (Ideographic Variation Sequence). This effectively means that the Tangut (西夏文) and Nüshu (女书/女書) scripts can now participate in the IVD.
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HKSCS-2016 & Adobe-CNS1-7

Posted on July 4, 2017 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

Unlike Unicode, which has been on an annual release cycle from Version 7.0, mainly to provide predictability to the release schedule for the benefit of developers, national standards—particularly East Asian ones—are updated much less frequently.

The latest East Asian national standard to be updated is HKSCS (Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set). HKSCS-2016, the fifth version of this particular standard, was published in May of 2017. As a result, and for the benefit of font developers whose fonts are based on Adobe’s public glyph sets, I used the morning of 🇺🇸’s Fourth of July of this year to publish Adobe-CNS1-7 via the CMap Resources open source project.
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