Recently in Languages & Character Sets Category

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).

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).

About two years ago I posted my thoughts on extended Cyrillic character sets. Now we're finally ready to talk about future extended Latin character sets, and to better document what we consider to be the existing Latin character sets as well. The largest character sets here (Adobe Latin 4 and Adobe Latin 5) are drafts; I welcome any feedback, especially (though not only) on things that "ought to be in Adobe Latin 5" but aren't there yet.

This post owes a special thanks to my colleague Miguel Sousa, who spent many hours compiling lists based on my spreadsheets and directions, and checked my data repeatedly in various ways. Any errors are probably mine, but he created the linked tables of HTML which are linked from this page, as well as the tab-delimited text files which are linked in turn from those pages.

One project I've been working on is to define some extended character sets: that is, more characters that we're going to have as standard in many of our future new fonts, and in some cases in future revisions to existing fonts.

First I tackled Cyrillic. What I'm presenting here is what you might consider a "late draft" - it's what we're going to go with unless we find errors or key omissions, and what Robert and I have been putting into the next typefaces we're working on. Feedback welcome!

Some time later this year I'm likely to get into the same process for Latin-based languages. So, if you have any thoughts on characters that we aren't yet putting in our newest Pro fonts, but you think would be useful additions, please comment. I'll accumulate any and all suggestions, and look into them more carefully when time permits.

Note: In your comments, I'd appreciate your referring to characters both by Unicode and some kind of descriptive name, or with links to detailed info. For example, you might say "you should include the new Ukrainian hryvnia currency symbol, U+20B4, in all your fonts which support Cyrillic," or "you should make sure your new or extended Latin fonts support the six accented letters needed by Esperanto: u with breve, and c g h j and s with circumflex. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto."

[NOTE: Special thanks to Emil Yakupov of Paratype for his careful analysis and review of the original version of this post. On Aug 3, 2006, I did several minor updates as noted below in the text. None of these affected our actual character set definition, however.]