Are you still considering even a simple vector release of glyph masters?

[Marcus98T]

This was asked before, and was answered as kinda too complicated to even do it, but I would like an update: Are you still considering whether or not to release every single Source Han Sans/Serif glyph masters, just the extralight and heavy masters in a simple vector format like SVG or something else? Maybe both the non-overlapped and overlapped format, in which the latter is used for variable fonts.

This includes the unreleased JP glyphs (most of them that appear only in Source Han Serif v1, like 还 and 掰) and even the v1.004 glyphs that were gutted in v2 like 嘟 and 惦, would they ever see the light of day again? Not in the font again of course, but just a source master.

I do note that it's not just JP/KR masters, it can also be CN/TW/HK masters.

[punchcutter]

There is no plan to release anything as SVG or another format, but now that there are variable font sources in this repo you can do it pretty easily by converting the source to UFO with the AFDKO tx tool and then running something like https://github.com/ctrlcctrlv/glif2svg. I tried just now and that script doesn't work without some adjustments to lines 105-106 to get the correct ascender and descender:

    if os.path.exists(fontinfo):
        with open(fontinfo, "rb") as f:
            plistd = plistlib.load(f)
            sp.miny = plistd.get("descender", -120) 
            sp.maxy = plistd.get("ascender", 880)

With that you can create SVGs from all the glyphs very easily.

As far as glyphs that existed before and were removed that's another topic. It's something we might be able to do in the future.

[Marcus98T]

Thanks for your reply. Hopefully font designers can at least have the option to improve their Source Han Sans derivative fonts with this workaround (albeit more time consuming), and glad that at least the possibility of releasing all the unreleased + removed JP glyphs is still on the table.

[NightFurySL2001]

I have provided a list of glyphs that were removed when going from 1.004 to 2.000 (hopefully it's correct) at #259.

[Marcus98T]

Interesting list.

They even have extra CN and TW glyphs which they also removed, likely reason being some characters whose glyph shapes that follow the extensive Chinese national standards are not practically used in their target language, for example, simplified Chinese don't really use 毎 and 吔 while traditional Chinese don't even use 华 so it's not necessary to have them to save glyph space.

Also another reason being that some technically separate v1.004 CN and TW glyphs are so similar to the JP glyphs, for example, 呈 and 起, the JP forms (even the hidden ones) should have been used and no one can tell the difference, so when v2 came out some of those JP glyphs are mapped to the CN and TW forms, and the similar looking CN and TW glyphs were removed as well.

I could probably download and check against the 1.004 CID list to see which locale they removed (I would be looking out for JP glyphs specifically, which I made such a plain text list before) but I don't have the time to go through this.

[NightFurySL2001]

Here is the text file (also uploaded in #259). Some glyphs are either remapped, changed (such as 简 as mentioned in #293) or renamed that makes this task real hard, and I do not provide any guarantee that this is correct.

shs-1.004-full-removed.txt

It would be good if Adobe can just directly release overlap version of v1.0 so others may copy from that instead of going through the list painstakenly again.

[Marcus98T]

This issue was posted two years ago. At that time I could not afford a font editing software that is easy-to-use. Now after learning a few things and getting Glyphs, I can simply change the request slightly to make it a little less ridiculous.

Because Source Sans and Source Serif's sources (the LGC-only fonts) are already released in UFO format, I can simply request that upon the next release of Source Han Sans/Serif that the CJK ideograph sources be released in a similar manner, in UFO format. There's no need for SVG format, although the information above is still useful if some font designers want to do that.

That also, I repeat, includes thousands of unreleased JP/KR/CN/TW glyphs that never made it to v1, those that were removed in v2, and existing ideographs that will soon be removed in the upcoming v3 of SHS for consolidation purposes. The reason why I request this time and time again is because:

For Source Han Sans, the number of additional JP ideographs that we originally intended to include was nearly 6,000, but over 4,000 of them needed to be removed prior to release, due to the 64K glyph limit. For Source Han Serif, we actually include almost all of the additional JP ideographs, which is why your friend U+6385 掅 appears in a form that is suitable for KR use (so-called Japanese traditional forms are almost always suitable as a Korean standard form).

Originally posted by @kenlunde in adobe-fonts/source-han-serif#58 (comment)

This is evidence that there are actually a lot more JP glyphs than what is publicly available. And in v1 of Serif, they had JP glyphs for about 3000 CJK ideographs for which they didn't have in v1 Sans, which defaulted to either CN/TW forms.

I understand the huge complexity in creating this font that supports multiple East Asian languages with glyph shapes and coverage being as reasonable as possible within the 65,535 glyph limit, and even having to accommodate handwriting forms for the Chinese regions and about 11K Korean Hangul glyphs, but at least consider the possibility of releasing overlapping sources of every CJK ideograph ever designed. Then anybody can at least work much faster to create a more region-appropriate fork as they see fit, and even fix some design bugs themselves. I know there will not be any warranty or support provided for the unreleased and removed glyphs if this happens, but it's better than nothing.

Also, some of these unreleased JP ideographs may finally need to be included in v3 of Source Han Sans (and maybe modified for CN/TW/HK/MO use), because as I said before, I think there will be a big redesign of Source Han Sans to accommodate Macao support and more urgently, GB18030-2022 support.

I am still holding on to the hope that the unreleased and removed sources for every single ideograph is still in Adobe's hands, waiting to be publicly released and set free. It will be such a huge waste if they are permanently deleted from Adobe's servers.

---

It would be good if Adobe can just directly release non-overlap version of v1.0 so others may copy from that instead of going through the list painstakingly again.

Late correction: I think @NightFurySL2001 actually means overlapped 1.004 sources. Non-overlapped sources just do not work with variable font usage and makes font editing harder.

[Marcus98T]

I just found a similar issue, so I'll just link it here:

• Raw glyphs before merging contours #119