As a follow up to my Ideographic Tally Marks article from over two years ago, the characters for two tally mark systems—ideographic (called 正の字 sei-no ji in Japanese, and 正字 zhèng zì in Chinese) and Western-style—are among the 684 new characters in Unicode Version 11.0 that was released exactly a week ago, and these seven new characters can be found in the existing Counting Rod Numerals block from U+1D372 through U+1D378.
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Japanese line layout is very complex, and the first attempt to standardize its rules and principles was in the JIS X 4051 standard, which was first issued in 1993 with the title 日本語文書の行組版方法 (Line Composition Rules for Japanese Documents in English). There was a revision issued in 1995, and the latest version was issued in 2004 with the slightly different title 日本語文書の組版方法 (Formatting rules for Japanese documents). Another important document is the W3C Working Group Note JLREQ (Requirements for Japanese Text Layout), which provides much of what is described in JIS X 4051, but covers additional areas, and is tailored toward web technologies. Although still considered working drafts, W3C is also preparing similar documents for Chinese and Korean as CLREQ (Requirements for Chinese Text Layout) and KLREQ (Requirements for Hangul Text Layout and Typography), respectively.
This article is not about these standards per se, which are intended for apps and environments that implement sophisticated line layout. Rather, this article is about harsher “plain text” or comparable environments that generally do not need such treatment, yet still benefit from a modest amount of context-based spacing adjustment, particularly to get rid of unwanted space between full-width brackets and other punctuation whose glyphs generally fill half of the em-box. App menus, app dialogs, and simple text editors are examples of where such adjustments can improve text layout in these modest ways.
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The CMap resources that are associated with our public glyph sets—called character collections—were first open-sourced on 2009-09-21 via Adobe’s first open source portal, and about a year later the project was moved to SourceForge. I then migrated the project to GitHub on 2015-03-27 where it is likely to remain for the foreseeable future. The main purpose for open-sourcing our CMap resources was to make it easier for developers to include them in their own open source projects, many of which require that the components themselves be open source.
I then open-sourced three of our four character collections on GitHub—Adobe-GB1-5, Adobe-CNS1-7, and Adobe-Japan1-6—in October of last year. The Adobe-Korea1-2 character collection was intentionally not open-sourced, because it will soon be replaced by the Adobe-KR-9 character collection that is expected to be published in mid-May.
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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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This is a very brief article whose purpose is to simply state that—due to recent events beyond my control*—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!
* Adobe’s IT folks apparently felt compelled to (once again) change the URLs for all of the font-related Adobe Tech Notes, including Adobe Tech Note #5078 (The Adobe-Japan1-6 Character Collection). Its URL is somewhat broadly referenced, including in the IVD_Collection.txt file of the latest version of the IVD (Ideographic Variation Database). The bottom line is that I needed a stable URL.
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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One of my hobbies is apparently to explore various ways to stress-test Adobe products, and the target of today’s article happens to be recent adventures with Adobe InDesign and our Source Han families.
The background is that I produced Unicode-based glyph synopses as part of the Source Han Sans and Source Han Serif releases, but those PDFs show only up to 256 code points per page, and it takes several hundred pages to show their complete Unicode coverage. I also produced single-page PDFs that show all 65,535 glyphs. A Source Han Sans one is available here, and a Source Han Serif one is available here. However, they are not Unicode-based.
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At seemingly every opportunity, whether via this blog or during public speaking engagements, I have made it abundantly clear that the Adobe-branded Source Han families share the same glyph set as the corresponding Google-branded Noto CJK families. That is simply because it is true. What requires a bit of explanation, however, is how the two typeface designs—Source Han Sans and Source Han Serif—differ. That is what this particular article is about.
As the Project Architect of these Pan-CJK typeface families, I have my fingers on all of the data that was used during their development, and for preparing each release. I can therefore impart some useful tidbits of information that cannot be found elsewhere.
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To take the previous article further—and because I tend to have an urge to stress-test environments—I added two more Super OTCs to the Source Han Super OTC open source project this morning.
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The release of Source Han Serif earlier this month, on 2017-04-03, gave me an opportunity to build yet another resource for stress-testing environments, particularly those that consume OpenType/CFF Collections. (This also continues to simplify file management by combining three Super OTCs into a much larger one.)
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Besides being the world’s first open source serif-style Pan-CJK typeface families, the Adobe-branded Source Han Serif and the Google-branded Noto Serif CJK also represent the first broad deployment of two highly-complex and related ideographs that are in the process of being encoded. Their glyphs are shown above in all seven weights. Although it may be hard to believe, the fourth line illustrates the simplified version.
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Or, perhaps more accurately, the project that has been keeping me busy for the past couple of years.
The Adobe-branded Source Han Serif (named 源ノ明朝 in Japanese, 본명조 in Korean, 思源宋体 in Simplified Chinese, and 思源宋體 in Traditional Chinese) and Google-branded Noto Serif CJK open source Pan-CJK typeface families, which represent the serif-style counterparts to the similarly-named and also open source Source Han Sans and Noto Sans CJK Pan-CJK typeface families, were released on 2017-04-03. You can read more about the Source Han Serif release here (日本語—한국어—简体中文—繁體中文), which includes a six-minute promotional video.
This article provides information that you would not expect to find in the official announcements for Source Han Serif or Noto Serif CJK, mainly because such information is intended for a completely different audience, which is primarily comprised of font developers.
Unless noted otherwise, all further references to Source Han Serif or Source Han Sans will apply to Noto Serif CJK or Noto Sans CJK, respectively.
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I will open this article by stating that OpenType features are almost always GSUB (Glyph SUBstitution) or GPOS (Glyph POSitioning). The former table specifies features that substitute glyphs with other glyphs, usually in a 1:1 fashion, but not always. The latter table specifies features that alter the metrics of glyphs, or the inter-glyph metrics (aka kerning).
The focus of this particular article will be the 'vert' (Vertical Alternates) feature, which substitutes a glyph with the appropriate glyph for vertical writing, and is invoked when in vertical writing mode. In other words, it’s a GSUB feature, and one that needs to be invoked for proper vertical writing. Current implementations that support the 'vert' GSUB feature, which tend to be CJK fonts, substitute glyphs with their vertical forms on a 1:1 basis, though language-tagging may affect the outcome for Pan-CJK fonts, such as the Adobe-branded Source Han Sans and the Google-branded Noto Sans CJK, which support multiple languages.
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Please pardon the apparent non-CJK interruption in the form of this particular article, but I wanted to bring to the readership’s attention a new open source project that has a very long history: ehandler.ps.
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Unlike the first and second similarly-titled articles that I published last month, this article will focus on a minor efficiency for the combining jamo feature of the Adobe-branded Source Han Sans and Google-branded Noto Sans CJK Pan-CJK typeface families.
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Again. I arrived on the afternoon of 2016-10-16.
This month provided to me yet another opportunity to visit Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun and my wife’s home country, thanks to IRG #47 (Ideographic Rapporteur Group Meeting #47) being hosted there. This trip was also the first time for me to visit an island of Japan other than Honshū (本州), specifically Shikoku (四国).
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One of my more popular open source fonts is Adobe Blank, and to a less extent the related Adobe Blank 2 because it uses a 'cmap' table format, Format 13, that is not broadly supported. Actually, Adobe Blank provides absolutely nothing, because it maps all 1,111,998 Unicode code points to a range of 2,048 non-spacing and non-marking glyphs, yet such a font is useful for particular scenarios, such as addressing the FOUT (Flash Of Unstyled Text) problem.
Allow me to introduce Adobe NotDef, which is modeled after Adobe Blank in that it covers all of Unicode and maps to a range of 2,048 glyphs, but differs in that the functional glyphs are spacing and marking. The original suggestion for Adobe NotDef came from Dave Crossland. The glyphs match the shape and advance width of the standard Adobe .notdef glyph that is invoked in environments that do not support font fallback when the selected font does not include a glyph for a particular character, and as Dave wrote, Adobe NotDef is useful for font fallback purposes in that it can be used to prevent the display of non-standard .notdef glyphs that may be present in some fonts in the font fallback chain.
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It seems that I am on roll, having released two new open source fonts on GitHub within the past week. The previous—and brief—article that was about the LOCL Test OpenType/CFF font simply pointed to the repository. This article will be longer. I promise.
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Inspired by the font that I prepared for and referenced in the previous article, I decided to launch a dedicated open source project for this useful test font, LOCL Test.
Enjoy!
