26: The Tofu Problem

In this in-depth technical discussion, Dr. Ken Lunde helps Elecia understand how to internationalize her (memory constrained) device.

CJVK Information Processing, Ken’s excellent O’Reilly book on internationalization [Note: there is a 40% off print and 50% off ebook coupon in the last few minutes of the show.]

Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)

Images of the bone ideograph that is different between Chinese and Japanese (U+9AA8) can be found on Wikipedia.

Other sources of information:

• Ken’s CJK Type Blog at Adobe
• Unicode specification, surprisingly readable though large
• An introductory tutorial Elecia found helpful

Open source type faces

• Source Sans Pro OpenType font family (for UIs)
• Source Code Pro OpenType font family (for programming environments)

Adobe’s open source projects and Ken’s contribution to those:

• Adobe Blank is a special-purpose OpenType font, making webpages wait to load fonts until they have the correct one
• AGL and AGLFN (Adobe Glyph List) maps glyph names to Unicode values
• CMap Resources are used to unidirectionally map character codes
• CSS Orientation Test are lightweight and special-purpose OpenType fonts that map all Unicode code points to glyphs that indicate their orientation based on the writing direction.
• Kenten Generic OpenType Font provides glyphs suitable for typesetting emphasis marks in Japanese.
• Mapping Resources for PDF are used to derive content from PDF files that include CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) information.

You can also reach Ken via lunde "at" adobe.com