Discovering Historical Gems

One of the fringe benefits of moving offices—especially when one has accumulated nearly 25 years of font-related material and it is thus not a pain-free exercise—is discovering Adobe East Tower to the West one, and part of the process is figuring which material to keep, and which to put into File 13. Anyway, I had been recently looking for a particular presentation that I prepared many years ago, and was fortunate enough to come across it while sifting through my accumulated materials.

This particular presentation, entitled Creating Fonts for the Unicode Kanji Set: Problems & Solutions, which I needed to scan into a PDF so that I could share it here, was delivered nearly 22 years ago at the Unicode Implementers' Workshop 6 in 1994 (equivalent to IUC6). There are two important ideas that I presented:

The idea to build Unicode CMap resources for CID-keyed fonts, which initially sparked the development of UCS-2 ones that were prematurely bundled with Adobe Illustrator Version 7.0, and which ultimately led to the development of fully-synchronized UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 ones, the last of which are used for the development of CID-keyed OpenType/CFF fontsThe idea to build a Pan-CJK font whereby a non-zero number of Unicode code points would include multiple glyphs to accommodate language-or region-specific conventions, which ultimately led to the development of the open source Source Han Sans and Noto Sans CJK typeface families

I very much enjoyed re-reading this historical document, which was a blast from the past, and I hope that some of you enjoy reading it, too. It provided to me a good dose of perspective, to realize what had been accomplished in the two decades that followed.

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