Typblography

‘Myriad’ in Arabic and Hebrew scripts

The ever-popular Myriad type family now has new Arabic and Hebrew members! These have recently been added as part of a suite-wide effort to provide better support for languages of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). These new typefaces were designed and developed by the Adobe type team in San Jose and have already be recognized for their excellence as one of the winners of the Letter.2 competition conducted by the Association Typographique Internationale. A core set of styles from these type families is bundled with Adobe Creative Suite 6 applications. This core set includes four basic styles: Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic. However, the type styles bundled with CS6 include only a small subset of the new Myriad Arabic and Myriad Hebrew type systems that were created to provide a wider range typographic options for designers. To preview and purchase additional styles or the full families, see our pages for Myriad Arabic and Myriad Hebrew. In the future, these pages will include glyph complement showings for the fonts, likewise full digital specimens with text showings are still forthcoming.

At the ATypI conference 2011 in Reykjavík, I gave a talk entitled “Pitfalls of Pi fonts.” This presentation was the culmination of a project that involved the creation of keyboard layouts for all of our dingbat fonts. The ultimate purpose of this project was the desire to replace obsolete Type 1 (T1) fonts with more current OpenType fonts (OTFs), which was necessary for various reasons, the most important of which being that T1 fonts lack proper Unicode information. On another hand, this shortcoming in the T1 font format was also its greatest advantage: virtually all the glyphs were easily accessible from the keyboard.
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Even though InDesign’s linguistic support is reasonably extensive, it covers only a few dozen of the world’s languages. Out of the box you’ll find support for most Western languages, from Bulgarian to Ukrainian, and if you happen to be using a Middle-Eastern (ME) version, you’ll also have support for Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew.

List of the languages supported out of the box by InDesign CS5.5

But what about other Arabic languages such as Urdu and Uyghur? Or Indian languages such as Hindi or Tamil? Or even other European languages such as Gaelic? Is it possible to enable those? The answer is yes, and there are two ways of doing it.
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I’m happy to announce the availability of three new Adobe typeface families and one new Japanese font package on our Type Showroom.

Adobe Text first became available in May 2010 as a registration incentive for CS5 and was included in the first wave of Adobe Web Fonts. Designed by Robert Slimbach, this text typeface is classified as a Transitional design (between calligraphic Renaissance and high-contrast Modern styles), with distinctive, contemporary touches.  Continue reading…

Rupee glyphs from various type styles

How often do you write out the words “dollars,” “pounds sterling,” or “euros”? I’d wager that you seldom do as the symbols $, £, €, and ¢ are so easily to write and to access via computer and mobile keyboards. We may take these currency signs for granted, however not every major currency has its own mark. In particular, the Indian rupee has not had its own symbol until the past year. In early 2009, the Indian government announced a competition calling for the development of a character that would symbolize its national currency, the rupee, at home and in international markets. The final design, a symbol created by Udaya Kumar, was chosen and was ratified July 15, 2010¹. In a rare case of good timing and swift action, the rupee symbol was encoded in the latest revision of the Unicode standard, version 6.0, which went into effect October 11, 2010².

Indian rupee symbol from Minion Pro Regular

Despite having been made official less than a year ago, it seems that the Indian rupee symbol is quickly gaining widespread use within India. This has resulted in several of Adobe’s major international customers requesting font support for this character. In order to accommodate these requests, the type team at Adobe has added the rupee symbol to the following typeface families: Minion Pro³, Myriad Pro⁴, Courier Std⁵, and Letter Gothic Std⁶.

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Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs (文化庁) published the official revision of the Jōyō Kanji (常用漢字) set less than a week ago, on November 30, 2010. For those who are unaware, Jōyō Kanji represent the kanji in common usage in Japan, and this set now includes 2,136 kanji. The 2010 revision is significant for several reasons, and I will briefly explore them in this post.
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One benefit of web fonts that many designers may not immediately think of is the potential to serve fonts for languages that website visitors may not have font support for on their local devices. In case you may have missed this information in earlier communications, the web fonts we are serving on Typekit are full analogues of desktop fonts. This means that the web versions of all our fonts have all the same glyphs and all of the OpenType features found in their counterparts. Although there is currently no mechanism for exploring language support on Typekit, I have been assured that this will be forthcoming. In the meantime, I thought it would be worthwhile to review the language support provided by our current set of web fonts.
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When Thomas Phinney announced via this blog three years ago that his typeface family was “available,” he left us with a bit of a cliffhanger by telling us that the italics would be forthcoming. Today I can tell you that the wait for the complete family is over. The roman and italic fonts can now be purchased online from our type showroom. We will be offering all of the faces as individual font sales, or available in two packages – one which includes the full family and another which offers only the italics. The package offering only the italics is offered at a special discount of $55 for all the italic fonts (versus $35 per font) and is intended for customers who received Hypatia as a registration incentive and only want the italic faces.

A partial showing of Hypatia Sans Pro Italic

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What’s up with fonts for CS5? The font set shipping with CS5 closely resembles the CS4 set with the following exceptions: The following families have been added to the CS5 font set:

• Adobe Arabic (4 fonts)
• Adobe Hebrew (4 fonts)
• Adobe Fan Heiti Std (1 font, “Bold” weight)
• Adobe Gothic Std (1 font, “Bold” weight)
• Ryo Display PlusN (5 fonts)
• Kozuka Gothic Pr6N (6 fonts)
• Kozuka Mincho Pr6N (6 fonts)

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A little over one week ago, the Japan NB (National Body) submitted to The Unicode Consortium their first IVD Collection for registration, which is being referred to as PRI 167 (Public Review Issue #167), but its actual name is the “Hanyo-Denshi” (汎用電子) IVD Collection. I was very pleased to see this, because it represents the second such submission.

The first IVD Collection to be successfully registered, of course, was the “Adobe-Japan1″ IVD Collection, which was declared final on December 14, 2007. We have thus far IVS-enabled fifty of our OpenType Japanese fonts based on these registered IVSes. Since then, the two major OSes, specifically Mac OS X (from Version 10.6) and Windows 7, have become IVS-enabled. Adobe Acrobat (from Version 9.0), Adobe Flash Player (from Version 10), and Adobe InDesign (from CS4) were the first products to become IVS-enabled.

My initial examination of PRI 167 found that there are 4,214 glyphs included, 1,924 of which represent standard or default forms. This meant 2,290 variant forms. Of these 2,290 variant forms, I found that 633 could map to Adobe-Japan1-6 CIDs, meaning to “Adobe-Japan1″ IVSes, though 28 could be argued either way due to subtle glyph differences.

I submitted my first round of PRI 167 comments to the submitter on April 8, 2010, which included a mapping table for the 2,557 (1,924 + 633) glyphs that can map between the IVD Collections. I plan to finish a second round of comments by the end of this month.

Because IVD Collection submissions require a ninety-day public review, I encourage others who are qualified to review its contents to do so.