Typblography

Next month I will be in Europe for two weeks, first in Reading, England, and then in The Hague, Netherlands. I will be giving a workshop that covers the various font development and testing tools we provide in the AFDKO*, to both the students of the MA in Typeface Design from the University of Reading, and the students of the Type & Media MA from The Royal Academy of Arts.

2008 workshop in progress in the Type & Media classroom (photo by Erik van Blokland)

Our groundbreaking new OpenType Japanese font, Kazuraki (かづらき), is now available for sale on our Type Showroom, including those for Japan, France, and Germany. Click here to be taken to the ordering page, which also includes links to its Specimen Book and Glyph Complement PDFs.

Kazuraki was designed by Adobe Systems' Senior Typeface Designer, Ryoko Nishizuka (西塚涼子), which began as a typeface called Teika that won the Silver Prize in the Kanji Category at Morisawa's 2002 International Typeface Competition.

Although Kazuraki is branded as a kana font, and includes a full complement of glyphs for hiragana and katakana, it also includes glyphs for 1,082 kanji, symbols, and punctuation, along with fifty vertical two-, three-, and four-character hiragana ligatures. A defining characteristic of Kazuraki is that is fully-proportional in both writing directions. Some glyphs are wider than they are tall, and vice versa, and this is reflected in the glyph metrics. Below is an example:

For those who wish to read about the production details, Adobe Tech Note #5901 is available, and a Japanese translation is provided.

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).