Posts in Category "Building Fonts"

To CID Or Not To CID

Posted on August 12, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

When developing OpenType/CFF fonts, in particular CJK ones or those with a large number of glyphs, one question that I am often asked by developers is whether it should be name-keyed or CID-keyed. The answer to this question is not simple, though it truly is a binary condition.
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CFR Support in Mac OS X Version 10.8 (Mountain Lion)

Posted on July 27, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

On July 25, 2012, Apple released to the world Mac OS X Version 10.8 (aka Mountain Lion). Among the many new features in this latest iteration of Mac OS X is support for CFR objects. For those who are not aware, CFR objects are based on ISO/IEC 14496-28:2012 (Composite Font Representation), and are used to define both composite fonts and fallback fonts. CFR objects effectively break the 64K glyph barrier. Mac OS X Version 10.8 is thus the first implementation that has broken the 64K glyph barrier.
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Tokyo AFDKO Workshop (PM Session)

Posted on June 28, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Once again, to those who were able to attend the Tokyo AFDKO Workshop that was held at Morisawa‘s Tokyo office on June 25th, thank you for your participation! Not counting those from Adobe and Morisawa, a total of 21 people attended. (Details about the AM session were covered in the previous article.)

For those who attended, and for those who could not attend, the presentation for Masataka Hattori’s (服部正貴) portion of the workshop is now available for download. Besides demonstrating how to build OpenType/CFF fonts based on the Adobe-Japan1-x and Adobe-Identity-0 ROSes, one of the highlights of Masataka’s presentation was demonstrating how to build a font that includes fully-proportional kana glyphs, based on the proven techniques which were used to develop Kazuraki (かづらき) that are detailed in Adobe Tech Note #5901 (Special-Purpose OpenType Japanese Font Tutorial: Kazuraki).
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Tokyo AFDKO Workshop (AM Session)

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

To those who were able to attend the Tokyo AFDKO Workshop that was held at Morisawa‘s Tokyo office on June 25th, thank you for your participation (and for enduring my poor Japanese speaking abilities)! I hope that you learned new ways in which particular AFDKO tools can be used to make your CID-keyed font production work (or workflow) more effective and less time-consuming.
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Two AFDKO-related Tool Updates

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

I spent this evening in Gyeongju, Korea enhancing two AFDKO-related tools, extract-cids.pl and extract-gids.pl.

These tools are tx filters, and simply output the list of CIDs or GIDs in a font. I had been using another tool, mkrange.pl, to turn the list into ranges. One of the enhancements, which is the addition of an “-r” option, makes the mkrange.pl tool no longer necessary. In other words, the following two command lines have the same result:

% extract-cids.pl -r <font>
% extract-cids.pl <font> | mkrange.pl

The extract-cids.pl tool was additionally enhanced with an “-s” option, which outputs the ranges on a single line using a comma separator. This makes the output very convenient in terms of repurposing it, such as copying it, then pasting it into a new command line as the argument of the “-g” option that is supported by many AFDKO tools. Consider the following two command lines and their output:

% extract-cids.pl -r cidfont.ps
/0-/8358
/8720-/9081
/9084-/9353

% extract-cids.pl -r -s cidfont.ps
/0-/8358,/8720-/9081,/9084-/9353

Enjoy!

Be warned…

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (1)

For those who signed up to attend the AFDKO Workshop that takes place on the 25th of this month in Tokyo, be warned that I will be conducting my portion, which is from 10AM until noon, in Japanese, or at least in my rendition of Japanese. ☺

Seriously, though, I hope that my Japanese skills, or lack thereof, don’t serve as an impediment for those who attend this workshop. My focus will be to demonstrate how particular AFDKO tools, such as tx, mergeFonts, rotateFont, autohint, and so on, can be used to not only build, but also to directly manipulate CID-keyed fonts. My hope is that I can convey useful information that can serve as inspiration for making font production workflows more efficient and less time-consuming.

For those who are attending, note that materials will be provided that will be based on a small subset of Kozuka Gothic Medium. If any attendee wants to use their own font data for this purpose, I suggest that you bring along an Adobe-Japan1-0 or greater OpenType/CFF font or CIDFont resource. I have prepared scripts that will quickly create the same materials, but using a different base font.

Wish me luck in finishing the accompanying presentation, which currently has 24 slides. In Japanese.

I am very much looking forward to meeting everyone who has signed up to attend this workshop!

Preparing for the Tokyo AFDKO Workshop

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

I am spending most of my time preparing for the Tokyo AFDKO Workshop that Morisawa is hosting at their Tokyo office on the 25th of this month, which is a Monday. At this point, most of the sample data is ready, and I now need to prepare the accompanying presentation slides.

This will be my first opportunity to engage a larger number of font developers, and to convey to them useful tips, tricks, and techniques for several AFDKO tools, particularly tx, mergeFonts, and rotateFont. My portion of the workshop, which will consume the entire morning, will be about building and manipulating CID-keyed fonts, to include controlling the assignment of CIDs (glyphs) to FDArray elements. I will also cover the use of the special-purpose Adobe-Identity-0 ROS. I am very much looking forward to this event, and working directly with many font developers.

Note that this workshop will be conducted in Japanese.

AFDKOワークショップ

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

ご注意：6月25日開催のAFDKOワークショップに多数のお申し込みをいただきありがとうございます。定員に達しましたので、AFDKOワークショップへの受付を締め切らさせていただきました。お申込みいただいた皆様とお会いできることを楽しみにしております。よろしくお願い申し上げます。

2012年6月25日、株式会社モリサワのご協力により、同社東京本社におきましてAFDKOワークショップを開催いたしますのでお知らせいたします。

弊社のAFDKO（Adobe© OpenType©フォント開発キット）を利用されてフォント制作を行われている開発者の方々を対象としたワークショップとなります。それぞれのツールについて有効な利用法について、弊社米国本社のKen Lunde（ケン・ランディ）を含む弊社スタッフが説明する予定です。ぜひご参加ください。
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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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“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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Know Your Documentation

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

For those who develop fonts—professionally or otherwise—it is prudent to know where the latest and greatest documentation is located. This is useful not only when searching for specific documentation, but also to check whether there are any updates to existing documentation.

The right-side navigation bar of this blog’s landing page includes links to relevant documentation and resource pages, such as for font-related Adobe Technical Notes, the OpenType Specification (hosted on Microsoft’s website), and even AFDKO (Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType). Also, don’t forget about the excellent font developer resources offered by Apple (Fonts), FontLab, and Microsoft (Microsoft Typography).

The AFDKO ‘tx’ Tool

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

Among the many excellent and powerful tools included in AFDKO (Adobe Font Development Kit for OpenType) is one with a two-letter name: tx. Although it has the shortest name, it is arguably one of the most powerful AFDKO tools.

The tx tool is best thought of as a multi-purpose font-file–manipulation tool. For those who don’t leverage this tool in the font development activities, I strongly encourage you to explore its capabilities, which is best done by perusing its built-in help and through experimentation.
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CID vs GID (Cont’d)

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

In yesterday’s CJK Type Blog post, I introduced and provided three Perl tools for listing the CIDs and GIDs in font resources: extract-cids.pl, extract-gids.pl, and mkrange.pl. In my continued effort to provide font developers with useful tools, I spent a few minutes this morning to enhance two of these tools, specifically extract-cids.pl and mkrange.pl.
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CID vs GID

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (2)

When working with OpenType/CFF fonts, particularly those that are CID-keyed, CIDs (Character IDs) and GIDs (Glyph IDs) are often referenced as ways to uniquely identify glyphs in a font resource. But, how are CIDs and GIDs different, and perhaps more importantly, under what circumstances are they different, or the same? These are good questions, and the answers can be found in today’s article.
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The BlueValues Array & Setting Its Values

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Dr. Ken Lunde | Comments (0)

When hinting name- or CID-keyed fonts, appropriate hinting parameters are required. One of these parameters are alignment zones whose purpose is to snap shapes to pixel boundaries. Alignment zones are specified in the required /BlueValues array, and also in the optional /OtherBlues array.

The required /BlueValues array is specified in the /Private dictionary of name-keyed fonts, and in the /Private dictionary of each FDArray element of CID-keyed fonts. The purpose of this array is to specify alignment zones that are at the baseline or above, such as for the baseline, x-height, and cap-height. The optional /OtherBlues array is used to specify alignment zones that are below the baseline, such as for the descender. This article will demonstrate how the AFDKO stemHist tool can be used to determine appropriate alignment zone values.
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