Typblography

I'd like to use this opportunity to share some recent artwork from Type Development at Adobe Systems. This is a thumbnail of a Kazuraki poster that was designed for an internal Tech Fair that will take place during the coming week. Kazuraki is genuinely proportional Japanese font that is based on the writings of Fujiwara-no-Teika, and designed by Adobe's own Ryoko Nishizuka. This poster was also designed by the font's designer. (Click on it to see a larger version.)

Finally. Yesterday, Friday, August 28th, 2009 is significant, at least for me, in that it represents the release date for Mac OS X Version 10.6 (aka, Snow Leopard). What is important about Snow Leopard is that it is the first OS that provides built-in support for IVSes (Ideographic Variation Sequences). Up until now, IVSes had been supported in specific Adobe products, such as Acrobat Version 9.0 and Adobe Reader Version 9.0 in the context of Forms, Flash Player Version 10, and InDesign CS4.

For those who are unaware of IVSes, they represent standardized Unicode behavior that allows otherwise unencoded variants of CJK Unified Ideographs to be represented using "plain text" that survives conditions that would cause rich text to fail. IVSes are registered via IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) Collections. The first IVD Collection to be registered at the end of 2007, was Adobe-Japan1, and is currently aligned with the Adobe-Japan1-6 character collection. See: http://www.unicode.org/ivd/

OpenType Japanese fonts can be IVS-enabled by building a Format 14 'cmap' subtable. The AFDKO tools (in particular, MakeOTF and spot) are IVS-savvy, as well as DTL OTMaster (and the Light version).

The Times Reader 2.0 released this week is a newsreader powered by AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) that was developed by Adobe in partnership with The New York Times Company. I contributed to the project; more about that later. It is a groundbreaking application that feels like a breath of fresh air amid all the unfortunate news affecting many newspapers across the country and worldwide.

You've seen it in the "mnemonic logos" and splash screens of Adobe's Creative Suite 3 and 4, and perhaps you wondered what that typeface was. After more than 25 years in the type development business, Adobe decided to have its own corporate typeface family. The Creative Suite uses were early versions of a family designed by Robert Slimbach. Now that it's been officially adopted at Adobe, I can tell you about our latest design, called Adobe Clean. There's no plan to make it available for licensing, but you'll be seeing more of it in Adobe materials and products as time goes on.

For those who were not aware, late last year we launched the CJK Type blog, which is meant to focus on CJK-related aspects of type (hence its name).

Yesterday marked the first month anniversary of my joining the type team here at Adobe, so I thought that I would briefly introduce myself to those who don’t know me.

I grew up in the rural north-west corner of Arizona in a town of about twelve hundred persons, on the border of the Navajo Nation. At a young age I became fascinated with the languages and cultures of peoples at home and abroad, and poured over encyclopedia articles illustrating the writing systems of ancient civilizations. I studied Spanish and Russian languages on and off from middle school through college, although I would say that I am now only conversationally fluent in either. I entered Brigham Young University intending on getting my degree in Russian language. Part of the reason I attended BYU was that I wanted to perform with its International Folk Dancing Ensemble, which I did (just not on the tour team). It was while in college that I developed a taste for everything Indian: the food, the music, the festivals, and especially Bollywood cinema.

A new release of the FDK, AFDKO 2.5, has been posted at:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko/

This release finally brings the FDK tools fully up to par with the OpenType specification. The most notable new features are that the FDK now fully supports all GSUB and GPOS lookup categories, and can apply the feature file directives to TTF source fonts to build TTF fonts with OpenType layout tables. The power of the FDK command-line tools can now be applied to building fonts for all scripts, including complex scripts such as Arabic and Indic.

AFDKO 2.5 also supports several of the newer OpenType features: user-friendly names for stylistic set features, and expanded lookup flag settings for use with mark classes. In addition, for CJK fonts, the tools now support Ideographic Variation Sequences (IVSes).

If you're someone who builds or tests fonts, please try it out! (Installation is now working better as well, and there is a command file for Windows that avoids the earlier need to edit environment variables). Note that the AFDKO is tools are all command-line based, and and require some willingness to get technical.

- Read Roberts