The Unicode Consortium Discussion Forum

This is perhaps a good place to draw attention to our CJK Type Blog, and specifically to our latest post about IVS (Ideographic Variation Sequence) support. See: http://blogs.adobe.com/CCJKType/

The "Subscribe to this blog's feed" link seems to be broken.

Are you sure? I just clicked on that link, using Safari and Firefox running on Mac OS X 10.6, and it took me to the right page.

False alarm. There was something wrong with something somewhere on the Mac I was using. I switched machines and it's working fine.

Very interesting, thanks!

Is it correct that at present only Adobe's fonts support IVSes? Could you provide a link for those?

Tom Gewecke
http://m10lmac.blogspot.com

Tom, you wrote:Perhaps. Several Japanese type foundries have expressed interest in IVS-enabling their Japanese fonts, and I seeded them with the tools and information they need for this.

Our first Japanese fonts to be IVS-enabled were the Kozuka Mincho Pr6N and Kozuka Gothic Pr6N families, which consist of six weights each. All released versions are IVS-enabled, and two of these twelve fonts are bundled with Acrobat 9.0 and Reader 9.0.

Adobe-Japan1-6 (aka, "Pr6" or "Pr6N") and Adobe-Japan1-5 (aka, "Pr5" or "Pr5N") fonts give the greatest benefit in terms of IVS-enabling, because they include the greatest number of unencoded kanji glyphs that benefit from the "plain text" nature of IVSes, to the tune of nearly 1,400 that become "encodable" via IVSes. Adobe-Japan1-4 (aka, "Pro" or "ProN") fonts have a little over 1,100 such kanji that benefit from IVS-enabling.

I did the work to IVS-enabled the Adobe-Japan1-4 (aka, "Pro") versions of the Kozuka Mincho and Kozuka Gothic families, along with our ten Heisei fonts, and the sixteen Ryo "PlusN" (Gothic, Text, and Display) fonts in 2008. That puts our number of IVS-enabled fonts right at 50. I am not sure whether the versions being sold in our Type Showroom are the versions that have been IVS-enabled. See: http://www.adobe.com/type/

If you are interested, I can post the first versions (as indicated by the head.fontRevision field) of the fonts that are IVS-enabled. The easiest path to obtaining IVS-enabled fonts, though, is to simply use one or more of our Pr6N fonts.

Mac OS X 10.6 supports fonts with IVS 'cmap' subtables. None of our fonts ship with them, however, and as Ken says, Adobe appears to be the only source of shipping fonts that use them at this point.

"IVS 'cmap' subtable" is a little misleading as the Format 14 CMAP subtable can be used for any variation sequences, not just ideographic variation sequences (although personally, I wish that it was restricted to IVS sequences).

Windows 7 ships with two fonts that have Format 14 CMAP subtables, Cambria Math and Microsoft PhagsPa, supporting Math and Phags-pa variation sequences respectively.

The Adobe Japan-1 IVS collection is too large for most font developers to support, but I am sure that if some small collections of IVS sequences are registered (as seems likely to happen soon) then I think that you will see fonts with IVS support appearing.

BabelStone, you wrote:I agree, and this is precisely the reason why I use UVS (Unicode Variation Sequences) when referring to the Format 14 'cmap' subtable in a generic context. This 'cmap' table format was designed to be used for more than only IVSes, thus this different abbreviation. The OpenType Specification uses UVS. See: http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/cmap.htm