Re: creating a test font w/ CJKV Extension B characters.

From: Frank Yung-Fong Tang (ytang0648@aol.com)
Date: Wed Nov 19 2003 - 21:23:08 EST

  • Next message: Frank Yung-Fong Tang: "Re: creating a test font w/ CJKV Extension B characters."

    Philippe Verdy wrote:

    > From: "Frank Yung-Fong Tang" <ytang0648@aol.com>
    > > It is not that easy for you from "don't know beans about fonts" to
    > > "creat a test font that contains ... \u20050". If you are lucky, it
    > will
    > > take you several month if not year. There are commercial base font
    > tool.
    > > But I am not sure they support 32 bits cmap or not (probably not).
    >
    > According to:
    > http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/cmap.htm
    >
    > The so-called "Microsoft Unicode" cmap format 4 (platfom id=3, encoding
    > id=1) is the one recommanded for all fonts, except those than need to
    > encode
    > supplementary planes.
    >
    > Format 0 is deprecated (was used to map 8-bit encodings to glyph ids), as
    > well as now Format 2 (was used to map DBCS encodings with leadbyte/trail
    > bytes in East Asia, as a mix of 8 and 16 bit codes)
    >
    > For supplementary planes, like a font built to support GB18030, the cmap
    > format 12 must be used instead with the same platform id, but the
    > encoding
    > id 10 (UCS-4).
    >
    > Format 8 is used to create a mix of 16-bit and 32-bit maps (with the
    > assumption that no 16bit Unicode character will have the same code
    > point as
    > the highest 16-bit of a character out of the BMP, meaning that it
    > works as
    > long as there's no glyph to assign for Unicode codepoints X between
    > U+0000
    > and U+0010 simultaneously with codepoints between X<<16 and (X+1)<<16 -
    > 1).This compresses a bit the size of the cmap.
    >
    > Format 10 is not portable unlike format 12 which must be provided in
    > addition to the recommanded format 4 for characters present in the
    > BMP. In
    > practice, this format is used mostly for GB18030 support, and
    > supported by
    > Windows 2000 and later. So you won't have to wait for years to create a
    > GB18030 font, using UCS-4 mappings...

    Which font tool currently support generating TTF with format 12? While
    it is true the font format and application software (such as mozilla I
    wrote, WinXP, Office XP, etc) is ready to deal with it, not many font
    tools which I know can create TTF with format 12 that are design for
    someone claimed himself as "don't know beans about fonts" to "creat a
    test font that contains ... \u20050" now.

    -- 
    --
    Frank Yung-Fong Tang
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