Hanazono fonts private use area

[Donald B. Wagner]

Dear all,

How can I use the amazing bunch of variant characters in HanaMinA and HanaMinB? In their “glyphlist.pdf” I found fx. a variant of 損 with a hook at the upper right instead of a mouth. Copy-pasting that into Word, and specifying the font, gives just an empty box. Copy-pasting into Wenlin gives the information that this is U+1099DF in the private use area of Unicode.

Tried pasting into Nisus, Pages, TextEdit, SeaMonkey. No way. Font Book shows all the characters, but PopChar doesn’t show them.

What am I missing? There must be a way of telling various editing programs to use the private use unicodes.

Regards
Don

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dr.phil. Donald B. Wagner
Jernbanegade 9B
DK-3600 Frederikssund
Denmark
Tel. +45-3331 2581
http://donwagner.dk
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[Jens Østergaard Petersen]

Hi Don,

You will be able to use this character if you download the Hanazono Plus files at <http://fonts.jp/hanazono/plus/>. From the glyphlist-plus.pdf, you can see that the character is encoded at U-F0795. You cannot copy the character from the PDF, but if you construct the numerical character entity &#xF0795; and convert this into a Unicode character (e.g. using UnicodeChecker <http://earthlingsoft.net/UnicodeChecker/>, calling UnicodeChecker as a service and applying HTML Entities > Unicode) and display this using HanaMinPlus.ttf, you should see the character you want. 

I have also entered this character on the next line

󰞕

There might be other ways of doing this ….

See also

<http://glyphwiki.org/wiki/koseki-139720>

<http://www.chise.org/est/view/character/%E6%90%8D>

Cheers,

Jens

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[Eric Rasmussen]

Hi folks,

This calligraphic [?] variant of U+640D is included in Unicode's IVD (Ideographic Variation Database), which is incorporated into the Hanazono fonts (in HanaMinA). So that's why/how it's there. Unfortunately, Adobe didn't include it in their Japan1 collection, so we won't find it in any Adobe fonts.

http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr37/

If you look here: <http://www.unicode.org/ivd/data/2014-05-16/>, you'll find it listed in the Moji Joho collection, which is the current Japanese standard (replacing Hanyo-Denshi). See here:

http://mojikiban.ipa.go.jp/mjc/1/

I've only recently re-entered the world in the last few weeks after a four-year hiatus, so I'm not up on the current state of things. Variant glyphs within Unicode fonts is a thing, however -- some of them have long existed in the Hiragino fonts that come with OS X. Adobe was another early adopter. But I don't remember how to access/display them (the variants), if I ever knew. Their use should, ultimately, be handled by software -- most users won't know how to use the IVSes (Ideographic Variation Sequences), if indeed that is what needs to happen here.

Jens has put together a workaround that should work well for Don, but it would be nice to know how these glyphs are *supposed* to work in a font like HanaMinA in the first place!

Anyone? If not, I'll see what I can learn. Note that 640D E0102 is the correct IVS for the variant. Adobe used 640D E0100 for the base character in Japan1 and 640D E0101 is used for the base character in Moji Joho.

Eric

[Jens Østergaard Petersen]

Thanks for reappearing, Eric ….

This has mystified me as well and what I presented was indeed a workaround.

If you download the Kozuka Mincho font from e.g. <http://sucai.redocn.com/font/473781.html> and write a 損 in TextEdit and apply the font, you can get some of the way, at least. If you choose ⌘-T and open the Typography submenu from the Settings (gear) menu to the left, you will see that it is possible to choose between 44 alternates. However, applying these has no effect on the Chinese character, as far as I can see, only on Roman letters. The Hanazono fonts do not present this option.

I was led this way by <http://m10lmac.blogspot.dk/2010/02/os-x-support-for-ideographic-variation.html> and <http://blogs.adobe.com/CCJKType/2010/02/ivs_support_the_current_status.html>. I have Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.5.5, but I do not know how to open the window that Ken Lunde opens.

Jens

PS: If one finds that using UnicodeChecker is too much, there is an easier way to go from numerical character representation to character. One can simply enter the numerical reference in an html document,

<html xml:lang="en" lang="en">

<head>

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

<title>my character</title>

</head>

<body>

&#xF0795;

</body>

</html>

and let the browser do the work by opening the page. 

--

[Eric Rasmussen]

On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 8:13 AM, Jens Østergaard Petersen <oes...@gmail.com> wrote:

There might be other ways of doing this ….

You can just install HanaMinPlus and then open the "Characters" palette, which used to be called the "Character Viewer" but is now found under "Emoji and Symbols" in the Edit menu of, say, TextEdit or Word (I used Word 2016 for Mac). Do "Customize List...." and under Code Tables activate the Unicode table. Then just go to F0795 in the Supplemental Private Use Area-A and double-click on the glyph shown in the "Character Variant" section to the right. See the attached. If you can't get the variant to appear, just double-click on the code point in the table, then change the font to HanaMinPlus in your document. Again, this worked for me in both TextEdit and Word, also Wenlin (after changing the font).

Use Font Book to find any other glyph in HanaMinPlus you might want to use (or just use the PDF that Jens used).

[Still working on the proper way to do this, without using HanaMinPlus...]

[TenThousandThings]

On Monday, May 16, 2016 at 11:23:30 AM UTC-4, Jens Østergaard Petersen wrote:

If you download the Kozuka Mincho font from e.g. <http://sucai.redocn.com/font/473781.html> and write a 損 in TextEdit and apply the font, you can get some of the way, at least. If you choose ⌘-T and open the Typography submenu from the Settings (gear) menu to the left, you will see that it is possible to choose between 44 alternates. However, applying these has no effect on the Chinese character, as far as I can see, only on Roman letters. The Hanazono fonts do not present this option.

I was led this way by <http://m10lmac.blogspot.dk/2010/02/os-x-support-for-ideographic-variation.html> and <http://blogs.adobe.com/CCJKType/2010/02/ivs_support_the_current_status.html>. I have Adobe Acrobat Pro 9.5.5, but I do not know how to open the window that Ken Lunde opens.

I have Creative Cloud with the latest InDesign, and it handles the Kozuka variants/alternates perfectly via the Type > Glyphs menu. And you can copy-paste the variants into other applications, like TextEdit.

But HanaMinA only works if you show the entire font repertoire Type > Glyphs. You can actually input the variant in question using HanaMinA in InDesign. But copying and pasting from there to, say, TextEdit does not work. So I don't know what that means.

[Donald B. Wagner]

Dear all,

Thanks for all your responses. This is obviously a bigger problem than I ever imagined. The method with Type>Glyphs in InDesign works nicely for me, but I don’t really have the time or patience to investigate the other suggestions. I have a bunch of calligraphic variants to put into a document, and for the foreseeable future I will do what I've always done, use a graphics program to make a gif with the character I need. Lots of these variants aren’t in Hanazono anyway.

So basically the Hanazono fonts are more-or-less useless to me.

Regards
Don

[Eric Rasmussen]

On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 5:06 AM, Donald B. Wagner <zapkatakon...@gmail.com> wrote:

... I have a bunch of calligraphic variants to put into a document, and ... Lots of these variants aren’t in Hanazono anyway.

So basically the Hanazono fonts are more-or-less useless to me.

Yes, I think the good news is that this technology exists and is moving forward, if very, very slowly. It seems to be driven largely by the needs of government and professional typesetting. Up to just recently, it was only Japan that had put the time and effort into identifying sets of variants to register. Currently Macao has submitted 11 variants that are in process and will be registered soon. But to my (limited) knowledge, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have not yet ventured into this area, which brings us, of course, to the bad news: compiling and processing sets of variants for Chinese is a project rather different in magnitude (not to mention politics) than what has been done so far in Japan.

For example, think of the Siku quanshu editions and the thousands of calligraphic variants that occur therein. Even if you could incorporate the proprietary work done by the makers of the electronic Wenyuange edition <http://sikuquanshu.com>, it would still be a big job to submit them for registration. Nonetheless, the end result would be fully Unicode-searchable texts that remain true to the original pages without being electronic dead ends.

Eric