Recently in tools 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).

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