Standardized Variants—Part 3

I will close this particular topic by detailing how to support these proposed standardized variants in OpenType/CFF fonts.

For fonts that are currently IVS-enabled, such as those that include Format 14 'cmap' subtables with Adobe-Japan1 or Hanyo-Denshi IVSes, it is important to note that the proposed standardized variants can co-exist with them, at least in terms of being specified in the font. For the former, I created an Adobe-Japan1_sequences.txt file that includes all registered Adobe-Japan1 IVSes, along with 89 of the 1,002 proposed standardized variants. The 89 standardized variants are at the end of the file. AFDKO tools, such as makeotf and spot, already support these standardized variants. When building OpenType/CFF fonts using the makeotf tool, this file is specified as the argument of the "-ci" command-line option.

For OpenType/CFF fonts based on the Adobe-CNS1-6 and Adobe-Korea1-2 ROSes, the Adobe-CNS1_sequences.txt and Adobe-Korea1_sequences.txt files specify the necessary variation sequences. The former specifies 12 variation sequences, and the latter specifies 270.

So, tools to support the creation of fonts that include these standardized variants are already in place. For those who consider standardized variants to be a solution for CJK Compatibility Ideographs, specifically referring to their susceptibility to the effects of normalization, I hope that they become standardized soon.