This article, which is the eighth installment of a brief annual report that started in 2019, provides to CJKV (Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese) and Unihan (Unicode Han) experts and enthusiasts a summary of this year’s developments. Below are links to previous years’ reports in reverse chronological order:

• 2025 "State of the Unification" Report
• 2024 "State of the Unification" Report
• 2023 "State of the Unification" Report
• 2022 "State of the Unification" Report
• 2021 "State of the Unification" Report
• 2020 "State of the Unification" Report

As mentioned in all previous reports, see 2019 “State of the Unification” Report for the original report that I published on Adobe’s long-static CJK Type Blog to which I contributed 300+ articles.

Unicode Version 18.0

New for 2026, of course, is Unicode Version 18.0, which was released on 2026-09-16. The following are some of the highlights of this new version of the Unicode Standard:

• Six new characters were added to the Kana Extended-A block (U+1B123 through U+1B128), and one character was added to the Small Kana Extension block (U+1B168).
• The disunified form of U+6B25 欥 was appended to the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension D block (U+2B81E).
• 17 Standardized Variation Sequences (SVSes) for characters in the CJK Strokes block were added.
• Two new provisional properties, kJapaneseNewVariant and kJapaneseOldVariant, were added to the Unihan database. These are Japanese analogs of the provisional kSimplifiedVariant and kTraditionalVariant properties that are intended for Chinese. Two provisional properties, kIRGDaeJaweon and kIRGKangXi, were removed, because they were considered redundant when compared with the provisional kDaeJaweon and kKangXi properties, respectively.
• As usual, the following were also updated for Unicode Version 18.0: the Unihan Database Lookup page, UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property “kStrange”), UTN #45 (Unihan Property History), UTN #50 (KP-Source Property Value History), and the open source Last Resort Font project.

Ideographic Research Group

Ideographic Research Group–related activities continued this year, and the following are some notable items:

• I chaired IRG Meeting #66 (virtual via Webex) and IRG Meeting #67 (hybrid in Tōkyō, Japan hosted by the SAT Daizōkyō Text Database Committee).
• I prepared for the second time an IRG meeting summary report for WG 2, covering IRG Meeting #65 and IRG Meeting #66, which is available on the WG 2 Summary Reports of IRG Meetings child page of the IRG home page.
• On 2026-02-14, I finished migrating available documents from the previous IRG document register to the current one that I established in early July of 2024. In addition, I was able to find and post to the IRG document register approximately 70 very early IRG documents in September, which included the very first three IRG documents, along with the resolutions from IRG Meeting #2 through IRG Meeting #4 and IRG Meeting #6 that were previously missing. At this point, the number of unavailable IRG documents is less than 700.
• I added two new—and hopefully useful—child pages to the IRG home page, specifically IRG Disunified Ideographs and Entangled Ideographs. The former replaced IWDS Series 4. The latter is simply a useful resource, and is based on a presentation that Eiso CHAN (陈永聪) delivered during BiangBiangCon (𰻞𰻞会) in Tōkyō, Japan on 2026-10-16, which was co-located with IRG Meeting #67.
• A major update of the IRG P&P (Principles & Procedures) was approved during IRG Meeting #66 then published on 2026-04-17 as Version 18. As stated in last year’s report, I converted its format from a PDF file exported from Microsoft Word to an HTML file that has many advantages, such as the ability to link to specific sections or subsections.
• In an effort to ensure that the important work of the IRG can continue into the future, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 established ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/AG 1 (Advisory Group 1) on 2026-06-26 per SC 2 Resolution M 31-10 (Establishment of Advisory Group 1 “Ideographic Research Group (IRG)”) on pp three and four of document SC 2 N5056 (Resolutions of the 31st ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 Plenary Meeting, Paris, France, 2026-06-22 and 26). I was also appointed as Convenor of AG 1 (IRG) in the same resolution. It is unclear as to when SC 2/AG 1 will replace SC 2/WG 2/IRG, so for now the later will carry on with business as usual.

The next IRG meeting, IRG Meeting #68, takes place next March as a virtual meeting via Webex.

IRG Working Set 2024

Highlights of IRG meetings include the review of the current working set, IRG Working Set 2024, which will soon begin its sixth and near-final round of review. This repertoire is expected to be standardized as the new CJK Unified Ideographs Extension K block, possibly in Unicode Version 20.0 (2028).

Related to the review of IRG working sets, two new and very important reference documents were approved and posted to IWDS Series 1 earlier this year:

• Document IRG N2951, Consolidated FS & SC Guidelines, was approved during IRG Meeting #66 and posted to IWDS Series 1 shortly after that meeting. This document replaces all previous IRG documents that prescribed FS (First Residual Stroke) and SC (Stroke Count) values.
• Document IRG N2952, Rules for Assignment of Radicals, was approved during IRG Meeting #67 and also posted to IWDS Series 1 shortly after that meeting.

Lastly, per Recommendation IRG M67.06 on page 2 of document IRG N2946, IRG Meeting #67 Recommendations and Action Items, the IRG is expected to begin accepting submissions for the next IRG working set that is likely to include approximately 10,000 ideographs.

UTC Meetings

Accordingly, four UTC meetings took place this year. Unlike previous years, I attended only two of the four meetings in person, UTC Meeting #186 in January and UTC Meeting #188 in July. UTC Meeting #189 in October was unique in that it was the first time a UTC meeting was hosted in Europe (Nancy, France). This is the fourth time that a UTC meeting was hosted outside the US. UTC Meeting #49 (1991), UTC Meeting #62 (1994), and UTC Meeting #99 (2004) were hosted in Toronto, Canada.

To prepare for UTC meetings, the CJK & Unihan Working Group continues to meet approximately three weeks prior to each meeting, up to a full three hours. As Chair of the meeting and working group, I subsequently spend the entire weekend that follows preparing the CJK & Unihan Working Group Recommendations, which are presented during each UTC meeting. See document L2/26-238 for my working group’s recommendations for UTC Meeting #189. The next meeting takes place on 2027-01-01.

The Unicode® CJK & Unihan Group

Unicode Version 19.0

Naturally, the next version of the Unicode Standard will be Version 19.0, which is scheduled to be released on 2027-09-15 per Section 3 of document L2/26-241R, which was approved during UTC Meeting #189 per Consensus 189-C52. As of this writing, there are 495 new Han ideographs that are targeted for Unicode Version 19.0. One is U+2B81F, which is an urgently-needed ideograph from China at the end of the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension D block, and which will fill the block. The remaining 494 Han ideographs are in two new blocks: 119 in CJK Unified Ideographs Components-A and 375 in CJK Unified Ideographs Components-B. These new Han ideographs were accepted during UTC Meeting #188 (494 ideographs) or UTC Meeting #189 (one ideograph).

The naming of the two new blocks is intentional, because the IRG expects to standardize additional blocks of Han ideograph components in the future. The most important Han ideograph components are in the CJK Unified Ideographs Components-B block. This should be particularly exciting for IDS (Ideographic Description Sequence) database maintainers, because it will allow a relatively large number of IDS components to be more faithfully represented as actual Han ideograph components. Or, if Han ideograph components were being represented by other means, they also can be more faithfully represented as actual Han ideograph components.

The code charts for the two new blocks of Han ideograph components are already available in the first progression (CDAM1) of Amendment 1 of ISO/IEC 10646:2026 (Seventh Edition): CJK Unified Ideographs Components-A and CJK Unified Ideographs Components-B.

As an aside, the very first proposal for encoding Han ideograph components was document IRG N368, Ideographic Component Supplement, which the IRG submitted to WG 2 in 1996. Nothing ever came of it except for the following encouraging words in item “b” of Resolution M31.13 on page 2 of document WG 2 N1454, Resolutions of WG 2 meeting 31:

WG 2 encourages the IRG to refine the proposals for Ideographic Structure Characters, the Ideographic Variation Mark, the Ideographic Component Supplement and the Ideographic Radical Supplement based on the comments received at WG 2 meeting 31.

It is interesting, to say the least, that it took a full 30 years to encode the first blocks of Han ideograph components. The idea of encoding Han ideograph components was first proposed in 1995 via document IRG N200, Discussion on Ideographic Components and Composition.

In terms of other new characters, two CJK punctuation marks, U+16FE5 WHITE IDEOGRAPHIC COMMA and U+16FE6 DOUBLE IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP, were provisionally assigned during UTC Meeting #188, then accepted for Unicode Version 19.0 during UTC Meeting #189. Like the two new Han ideograph components blocks, these two CJK punctuation marks can be seen in the code charts for the Ideographic Symbols and Punctuation block in CDAM1 of Amendment 1 of ISO/IEC 10646:2026.

The first public showing of new characters that are targeted for Unicode Version 19.0 will be in the Alpha review that is scheduled to begin on 2027-02-09 per Section 3 of document L2/26–241R.

Next, a new IRG source for Singapore, which will be instantiated as the new normative kIRG_SGSource property, was accepted for Unicode Version 19.0 during UTC Meeting #188.

Lastly, four horizontal extensions that were recommended by the IRG during IRG Meeting #67 were accepted for Unicode Version 19.0 during UTC Meeting #189. These were submitted by China (9,178 ideographs), TCA (700 ideographs), the UK (two ideographs), and the UTC (74 ideographs). A large horizontal extension that Vietnam proposed and is which is currently under review by IRG experts is expected to be recommended by the IRG during IRG Meeting #68 next March, and may also be accepted for Unicode Version 19.0. See document IRG N2970 for more details.

Below is the current synopsis of CJK Unified Ideographs in the Unicode Standard with the tentative additions for Unicode Version 19.0, along with adjusted figures, highlighted in yellow:

This synopsis is now being made available as a machine-readable data file. Document IRG N2964 is for Unicode Version 18.0 and deployed as a PDF file in IWDS Series 3, and the same document number is associated with its corresponding data file (simply replace “pdf” with “txt” in the URL).

Lastly, and completely unrelated to Unicode Version 19.0, a tenth version of the IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) was published on 2026-08-03 that registered eight additional IVSes in the registered Moji_Joho IVD collection. In addition, there is now a Latest Version link in the header of the IVD home page that links to the latest version of the IVD, and the URLs for all six registered IVD collections are now maintained by the IVD Registrar (aka me) and will therefore never become stale. In other words, good progress.

About the Author

Dr Ken Lunde has worked for Apple as a Font Developer since 2021-08-02 (and was in the same role as a contractor from 2020-01-16 through 2021-07-30), is the author of CJKV Information Processing Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2009), and earned BA (1987), MA (1988), and PhD (1994) degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to working at Apple, he worked at Adobe for over 28 years — from 1991-07-01 to 2019-10-18 — specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he architected and developed fonts for East Asian typefaces, along with the standards and specifications on which they are based. He architected and developed the Adobe-branded “Source Han” (Source Han Sans, Source Han Serif, and Source Han Mono) and Google-branded “Noto CJK” (Noto Sans CJK and Noto Serif CJK) open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019, and published over 300 articles on Adobe’s now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken serves as the Unicode Consortium’s IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) Registrar, attends UTC meetings, participates in the UTC Editorial Working Group, became an individual Unicode Life Member in 2018, received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award, was a Unicode Technical Director from 2018 to 2020, was a Vice-Chair of the Emoji Standard & Research Working Group from 2019 through 2024, published UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property “kStrange”) in 2020, became Chair of the CJK & Unihan Working Group in 2021, published UTN #45 (Unihan Property History) in 2022, published UTN #50 (KP-Source Property Value History) and UTN #53 (CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B, UCS2003 Reference Glyphs) in 2023, published UTN #60 (Legacy Hangul Syllables Mappings) and was appointed as Convenor of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2/IRG (Ideographic Research Group) in 2024, and was appointed as Convenor of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/AG 1 (IRG) in 2026. He and his wife, Hitomi, continue to be proud owners of a His & Hers pair of acceleration-boosted 2018 LR Dual Motor AWD Tesla Model 3 EVs named Herbie and Baby Ruby.

Unification is what brings people together, which is one reason why I always look forward to preparing this report at the end of each year. Of course, I continue to serve in the roles of the Chair of the UTC CJK & Unihan Working Group and the Convenor of the IRG (Ideographic Research Group) under ISO. This article, which is the seventh installment of a brief annual report that started in 2019, provides to CJKV (Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese) and Unihan (Unicode Han) experts and enthusiasts a summary of this year’s developments.

• 2024 “State of the Unification” Report
• 2023 "State of the Unification" Report
• 2022 "State of the Unification" Report
• 2021 "State of the Unification" Report
• 2020 "State of the Unification" Report

As usual, see 2019 “State of the Unification” Report for the original report that I published on Adobe’s long-static CJK Type Blog to which I contributed 300+ articles.

It was with great sadness that longtime contributor to the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646, Andrew West, passed away on 2025-07-10 at the age of 65. I frequently interacted with Andrew on CJKV- and Unihan-related matters, but only once had the honor of meeting him in person, which was in June of 2019. The animated banner at the top of the IRG home page, which is shown below, was added several months before his passing, and shall now remain there in his memory:

This is because Andrew submitted this Han ideograph for IRG Working Set 2015 as a contribution from the UK, which became standardized as the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G block in Unicode Version 13.0 (2020).

And, for those who may be interested, I have the following two upcoming speaking engagements, the first of which is next week:

• A panel discussion entitled Behind the Curtain: The Unicode Technical Committee at UTW 2025 that I will be joining in my capacity as Chair of the UTC CJK & Unihan Working Group. This event takes place from 2025-11-11 through 2025-11-13 at Microsoft’s campus in Mountain View, California.
• One of three keynote speakers at CITPC’s 15th Anniversary Symposium that I will be joining in my capacities as Chair of the UTC CJK & Unihan Working Group, Registrar of the Unicode IVD (Ideographic Variation Database), and Convenor of the IRG (Ideographic Research Group). This event takes place from 1 to 5:30PM on 2025-12-12 in Tōkyō, Japan. CITPC (文字情報技術促進協議会) stands for Character Information Technology Promotion Council.

Unicode Version 17.0

New for 2025 is Unicode Version 17.0, which was successfully released on 2025-09-09. There are now over 100,000 CJK Unified Ideographs in the Unicode Standard, 101,996 to be exact, which is a significant milestone. Among the new CJK Unified Ideographs are the following:

• 4,298 in the new CJK Unified Ideographs Extension J block. This was the result of IRG Working Set 2021, which was the last repertoire of Han ideographs that was developed under the guidance of Dr LU Qin (陸勤) as the former Convenor of the IRG.
• Six urgently-needed ideographs were appended to the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C block at code points U+2B73A through U+2B73F, filling said block.
• 12 urgently-needed ideographs were also appended to the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E block at code points U+2CEA2 through U+2CEAD.

I am now maintaining the synopsis of CJK Unified Ideographs and CJK Compatibility Ideographs in the Unicode Standard as IWDS (IRG Working Document Series) Series 3, and document IRG N2856 provides this information for Unicode Version 17.0.

As documented in UAX #38, there was once again some churn among Unihan database properties, in terms of existing properties being removed and a new property being added:

• Two existing provisional properties — kGB7 and kJa — were removed from the Unihan database, because they were deemed to be no longer relevant.
• One new provisional property — kTayNumeric — was added to the Unihan database.

In addition, the syntax of the informative kTotalStrokes property was updated to allow only a single property value, specifically the one that adheres to the way in which the IRG counts strokes.

Three other related things were released on the same date that Unicode Version 17.0 itself was released:

• Version 4 of UTN (Unicode Technical Note) #43, Unihan Database Property “kStrange,” which was updated for Unicode Version 17.0. There are now 803 CJK Unified Ideographs in the Unicode Standard that have this property, which is 0.79%.
• Version 5 of UTN #45, Unihan Property History, which was updated for Unicode Version 17.0.
• Version 3 of UTN #50, KP-Source Property Value History, which was updated for Unicode Version 17.0. The update included the addition of two new tables that record known issues. Version 4 was published on 2025-10-04 in order to make two additions to the first table.
• Version 17.000 of the open source Last Resort fonts, which were updated for Unicode Version 17.0. The sources and building instructions were added in the previous release.

Completely unrelated to Unicode Version 17.0, a new CJK-related Unicode Technical Note was published on 2025-10-27:

• UTN #62, Transliteration of Korean Script into Latin Characters, which provides the transliteration tables and notes in Section 4 of the ISO/TR 11941:1996 technical report, Information and documentation — Transliteration of Korean script into Latin characters, which was withdrawn by ISO in December of 2013, and therefore no longer available.

Ideographic Research Group

IRG-related activities continued this year, and the following are some notable items:

• I chaired IRG Meeting #64 (virtual via Webex) and IRG Meeting #65 (hybrid in Guangzhou, China hosted by Jinan University). I was unable to travel to China, so I ended up attending and chairing the meeting remotely from Tokyo, Japan. In order to be functional to chair a one-week standardization meeting, I needed to be in a similar time zone, and for me that meant Japan, which is one hour ahead of China.
• I prepared for the first time an IRG meeting summary report for WG 2, covering IRG Meeting #63 and IRG Meeting #64, and in order to collect all such prior reports in one convenient place, I established a new WG 2 Summary Reports of IRG Meetings child page of the IRG home page.
• I continued to migrate documents from the previous IRG document register to the new one that I established in early July of last year. As of this writing, I have migrated approximately 81% of the available documents. Of course, the process will continue until I reach 100%.
• I added two new useful child pages to the IRG home page, specifically IRG Source Prefixes and Representative Glyph Changes. The former is intended to replace Annex D of the IRG P&P. The latter is useful for developers to know which representative glyphs have been updated, and which representative glyph updates are being targeted for the next version of the Unicode Standard.
• One of my tasks as Convenor was to update the IRG P&P (Principles and Procedures) document. In addition to preparing the first draft of Version 18 as document IRG N2850, I also converted its format from a PDF file exported from Microsoft Word to an HTML file that has many advantages, such as the ability to link to specific sections or subsections. I was tasked to prepare a second draft by 2025-12-19 as document IRG N2850R. The hope is to approve IRG P&P Version 18 during IRG Meeting #66.
• Work on establishing new blocks for encoding CJKV components continues, with document IRG N2878R being the latest iteration. In lieu of blocks named CJK Unified Ideographs Jianzi Musical Notation Components and CJK Unified Ideographs Components, the former one being quite a mouthful, feedback from UTC Meeting #185 suggested more generalized block names, such as CJK Unified Ideographs Components-A and CJK Unified Ideographs Components-B. A revised proposal is expected to be ready for review by the end of this year. If accepted, the earliest that the new blocks would be standardized would be in Unicode Version 19.0 (2027).

The next IRG meeting, IRG Meeting #66, takes place next March as a virtual meeting.

IRG Working Set 2024

Half of the time of an IRG meeting is used to review the current IRG work set, which is IRG Working Set 2024 that just finished its third review cycle. This repertoire is expected to be standardized as the new CJK Unified Ideographs Extension K block.

Related to the review of IRG working sets, work on a consolidated set of prescriptive SC (stroke count) and FS (first [residual] stroke) guidelines began, with document IRG N2862 being the first draft. This will replace, correct, and supplement all previous stroke-related guidelines. The IRG expects to approve a revised version of this document at IRG Meeting #66.

UTC Meetings

Adobe, bless their hearts, can no longer host UTC meetings that I am expected to attend, which caused a bit of a shuffle for UTC meeting hosts for this year. This is per INCITS’ “U.S. Hosting of International Meetings” policy, specifically the second bullet in Section 7.14 of INCITS Organization, Policies and Procedures that is quoted below:

confirmation that no U.S.-hosted meeting shall be held where the attendance or presence of U.S. or international delegate could be questioned or challenged for any reason, e.g., by a security sensitive host;

The quarterly INCITS’ Character Sets and Internationalization (aka L2) committee meets at the same location as the quarterly UTC meetings, and Adobe, supposedly being a security sensitive host, refused to remove me from their Watch List™, hence the application of this policy. It still boggles my mind that I am on such a list. Anyway, this is very unfortunate for me, because among the various hosts of UTC meetings, Adobe’s HQ in downtown San José, California was by far the most convenient location for me, being less than 10 miles from my home.

My 28+ Years of #AdobeLife

In any case, I ended up attending all four UTC meetings this year in person, two of which were hosted by Microsoft, but at different campuses: Mountain View, California for UTC Meeting #183 in April, and Redmond, Washington for UTC Meeting #184 in July.

To prepare for UTC meetings, the CJK & Unihan Working Group continues to meet approximately three weeks prior to each meeting, up to a full three hours. As the chair of the meeting and working group, I subsequently spend the entire weekend that follows preparing the CJK & Unihan Working Group Recommendations, which are presented during each UTC meeting. See document L2/25-231 for our working group’s recommendations for UTC Meeting #185.

The Unicode® CJK & Unihan Group

Unicode Version 18.0

Now that Unicode Version 17.0 has been released, work on Unicode Version 18.0 has begun. As of this writing, there is only one new CJK Unified Ideograph that is targeted for Unicode Version 18.0, which is U+2B81E at the end of the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension D block. This new code point is the result of the disunification of U+6B25 欥 in the URO per Recommendation IRG 65.06 in document IRG N2826, which was accepted by the UTC during UTC Meeting #185.

Below is the current synopsis of CJK Unified Ideographs in the Unicode Standard with the tentative addition for Unicode Version 18.0 highlighted in yellow:

Lastly, a new version of the IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) was published on 2025-07-14 that registers the new CAAPH (Culture and Art Publishing House) IVD collection. This represents a milestone, because it is the very first IVD collection that is targeted for use by China.

In closing, and as usual, I look forward to continuing to chair both CJK & Unihan Working Group and IRG meetings, and attending more IRG and WG 2 meetings than in the past.

About the Author

Dr Ken Lunde has worked for Apple as a Font Developer since 2021-08-02 (and was in the same role as a contractor from 2020-01-16 through 2021-07-30), is the author of CJKV Information Processing Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2009), and earned BA (1987), MA (1988), and PhD (1994) degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to working at Apple, he worked at Adobe for over 28 years — from 1991-07-01 to 2019-10-18 — specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he architected and developed fonts for East Asian typefaces, along with the standards and specifications on which they are based. He architected and developed the Adobe-branded “Source Han” (Source Han Sans, Source Han Serif, and Source Han Mono) and Google-branded “Noto CJK” (Noto Sans CJK and Noto Serif CJK) open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019, and published over 300 articles on Adobe’s now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken serves as the Unicode Consortium’s IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) Registrar, attends UTC meetings, participates in the UTC Editorial Working Group, became an individual Unicode Life Member in 2018, received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award, was a Unicode Technical Director from 2018 to 2020, became a Vice-Chair of the Emoji Standard & Research Working Group in 2019, published UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property “kStrange”) in 2020, became the Chair of the CJK & Unihan Working Group in 2021, published UTN #45 (Unihan Property History) in 2022, published UTN #50 (KP-Source Property Value History) and UTN #53 (CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B, UCS2003 Reference Glyphs) in 2023, published UTN #60 (Legacy Hangul Syllables Mappings) and was appointed as the new IRG (Ideographic Research Group) Convenor in 2024. He and his wife, Hitomi, continue to be proud owners of a His & Hers pair of acceleration-boosted 2018 LR Dual Motor AWD Tesla Model 3 EVs.

Unusual (again) this year were several events that affected my standardization-related activities, along with the extent of my engagement. Unchanged, of course, is that I continue to serve as the Chair of the UTC CJK & Unihan Working Group that I formed in early 2020 due to COVID-19. This article, which is the sixth installment of a brief annual report that began its life in 2019, provides to CJK (Chinese, Japanese & Korean) and Unihan (Unicode Han) experts and enthusiasts a snapshot of this year’s developments.

• 2023 "State of the Unification" Report
• 2022 "State of the Unification" Report
• 2021 "State of the Unification" Report
• 2020 "State of the Unification" Report

See 2019 “State of the Unification” Report for the original report that I published on Adobe’s long-static CJK Type Blog to which I contributed 300+ articles.

Unicode Version 16.0

New for 2024 is a new version of the Unicode Standard, Unicode Version 16.0, which was successfully released on 2024-09-10. There are still 97,680 CJK Unified Ideographs in the Unicode Standard, which is unchanged from Version 15.1 that was released a year earlier. New in this version is a completely revamped Core Specification that was built from the ground up as a web-based document. I would like to make special mention of Appendix F, Documentation of CJK Strokes, whose tables were completely redone, and now includes color to highlight the strokes in the example ideographs. This appendix also includes the two new strokes that were added to the CJK Strokes block, U+31E4 CJK STROKE HXG and U+31E5 CJK STROKE SZP.

As documented in UAX #38, there was a little bit of churn among Unihan database properties, in terms of an existing property being removed and new properties being added:

• One existing provisional property — kFrequency — was removed from the Unihan database, because it was deemed to be out-of-date and no longer relevant.
• Two new provisional properties — kFanqie and kZhuang — were added to the Unihan database.

In addition, the coverage of the normative kIRG_JSource property was significantly expanded to add over 36,000 new source references that correspond to the Moji Jōhō Kiban (文字情報基盤) database. This massive horizontal extension was first suggested by yours truly in the CJK Type Blog article entitled Unihan & Moji Jōhō Kiban Project: The Tip of the Iceberg that was published at the beginning of 2018. See document L2/23-144 (aka WG2 N5221) for more details.

The syntax of the informative kRSUnicode property was once again enhanced, this time to accommodate a second non-Chinese simplified radical. Chinese simplified radicals have been specified by a single apostrophe following the radical number, and Unicode Version 15.1 introduced the use of two apostrophes to specify non-Chinese simplified radicals. Unicode Version 16.0 introduced the use of three apostrophes to specify a second non-Chinese radical. The benefit of this enhancement is best visualized in the Radical-Stroke Index (46MB) whose annotated excerpt for Radical #212 is shown below:

Chinese simplified radicals are outlined in red, the first non-Chinese simplified radicals are outlined in green, and the second non-Chinese simplified radicals are outlined in blue. As you can see, the sorting order for any given radical-stroke value pair is 1) traditional; 2) Chinese simplified; 3) first non-Chinese simplified; and then 4) second non-Chinese simplified. The other radical-stroke indexes, which are associated with the kIICore and kUnihanCore2020 properties, include the same enhancement, but they support a small subset of ideographs, and do not include any instances of a second non-Chinese simplified radical.

Related to the above, Unicode Version 16.0 also introduced a “plain text” data file version of the Radical-Stroke Index that serves as an alternate representation of the same radical-stroke data. I developed a private command-line tool in Python years ago that now uses this data file to allow me to lookup ideographs and their metadata by radical-stroke value pair.

Three other related things were released on the same date that Unicode Version 16.0 itself was released:

• Version 3 of UTN (Unicode Technical Note) #43, Unihan Database Property “kStrange,” which was updated for Unicode Version 16.0.
• Version 4 of UTN #45, Unihan Property History, which was updated for Unicode Version 16.0.
• Version 16.000 of the open source Last Resort fonts, which were updated for Unicode Version 16.0. This release is different from previously releases in that the sources and build scripts are now included in the repository.

Completely unrelated to Unicode Version 16.0, I published two new Unicode Technical Notes since last year’s SOTU report was published:

• UTN #53, CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B, UCS2003 Reference Glyphs, which provides the location of and additional background information on the historical “UCS2003” (aka ISO/IEC 10646:2003) representative glyphs that were removed from the code charts for the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B block in Unicode Version 14.0 (September, 2021).
• UTN #60, Legacy Hangul Syllables Mappings, which provides historical mappings between the Unicode code points for the 11,172 characters in the Hangul Syllables block (AC00..D7A3) and legacy character set and encoding standards that include hangul syllables.

Ideographic Research Group

Involvement in the IRG (Ideographic Research Group) ratcheted up a couple of notches this year, as evidenced by the following two bullet items:

• I was appointed as the new Convenor of the IRG on 2024-06-14 during the co-located SC 2 (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2) #29 and WG 2 (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2) #71 meetings that took place in Prague, Czech Republic. Dr LU Qin (陸勤) retired after serving as the Convenor of the IRG for 20 solid years, from 2004 until 2024. IRG Meeting #63, which took place last month in Seoul (ROK), was the first IRG meeting for which I served as its Convenor.
• I established a new home page and a new document register for the IRG in early July, and have thus far migrated over one-third of the IRG documents from the previous document register. I expect to complete document migration—at least for the documents that are available in the previous document register—by this time next year.

About the first item, the photo below shows the etching of the award that was presented to Dr Lu during IRG Meeting #63, and click here to see a photo from when I presented the actual award to Dr Lu on the first day of the meeting:

IRG Meeting #63 was hosted by the National Institute of Korean Language (NIKL). As the new Convenor, I prepared for the first time the meeting recommendations and action items, which I published as document IRG N2702.

A topic that will be discussed during IRG Meeting #64 next March is the establishment of a new block that includes CJK components. See document IRG N2733R for the preliminary proposal from China. My idea is to encode these CJK components as ordinary CJK Unified Ideographs in a new block tentatively named CJK Unified Ideographs Components, which would be modeled after the similarly-named Tangut Components block. I discussed this idea during UTC Meeting #181 that took place this week, and I received positive feedback.

Another topic that will be discussed during the next IRG meeting is the subject of script-hybrid ideographs. I demonstrated during IRG Meeting #63, by providing a brief tour of UTN #43, Unihan Database Property “kStrange,” that script-hybrid ideographs have already been encoded, particular those that include hangul or kana components, along with other oddball components. The crux of the issue is really how to handle script-hybrid ideographs that include Latin components, such as the ones below that are abbreviated forms of the ideographs 慶 (kei) and 應 (ō) that represent 慶應大学 (keiō daigaku; Keio University):

IRG Working Set 2024

Han ideographs will continue to be encoded, and to this end, seven IRG member bodies—China, ROK, SAT, TCA, UK, UTC, and Vietnam—submitted a total of 4,674 new ideographs for IRG Working Set 2024 whose review cycle has just started, and will continue for the next two to three years. Please visit the new IRG home page to get links to each member body submission. The first review round just finished.

UTC Meetings

Attending UTC meetings in person is very important to me, and unfortunately I was able to attend only three of the four meetings this year in person. To both my surprise and amusement, I discovered in late April, while attempting to attend UTC Meeting #179, that I am suddenly on Adobe’s Watch List™, which means that I am unable to attend meetings and events that are hosted on Adobe property. I therefore attended that meeting remotely from home less than 10 miles away. Sigh. Of course, my departure from Adobe five years ago wasn’t exactly on the most amicable of terms, so I will simply attribute this phenomenon to Murphy. Or something…

In terms of good news, and about the CJK & Unihan Working Group in particular, please join me in welcoming its new Vice-Chair, Eiso Chan (陈永聪). I have known Eiso for many years, and he has already proven to be a very capable Vice-Chair of this UTC working group. I look forward to working with him for many years. The last time we met face-to-face was during IRG Meeting #51 six years ago.

To prepare for the UTC meetings, the CJK & Unihan Working Group continues to meet approximately three weeks prior to each meeting, up to a full three hours. As the chair of the meeting and working group, I subsequently spend the entire weekend that follows preparing the CJK & Unihan Working Group Recommendations, which are presented during each UTC meeting. See document L2/24–227R for our working group’s recommendations for UTC Meeting #181.

The Unicode® CJK & Unihan Group

Unicode Version 17.0

Nearly all of the new characters in Unicode Version 17.0 are expected to be in the new CJK Unified Ideographs Extension J block, which was processed by the IRG as IRG Working Set 2021. As submitted to WG 2 as document WG 2 N5257R2, the total number of ideographs is exactly 4,300 (see document IRG N2707 for its first draft). However, the UTC accepted the removal of two ideographs during UTC Meeting #181, so the block is now officially smaller by that figure.

Unicode Version 17.0 is also expected to include five additional ideographs that will be appended to the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension C block. Two of them are the result of disunifying U+5CC0 峀 and U+2335F 𣍟, and the other three are urgently-needed ideographs from China (one from document IRG N2691) and TCA (two from document IRG N2709).

Below is the current synopsis of CJK Unified Ideographs in the Unicode Standard with tentative additions for Unicode Version 17.0 highlighted in yellow:

China prepared another UNC (Urgently Needed Character) proposal, document IRG N2753 that includes nine ideographs, which will be discussed during IRG Meeting #64 next March, so the number of CJK Unified Ideographs in Unicode Version 17.0 is likely to increase by that small figure. There is always the possibility that they will be deferred until Unicode Version 18.0 (2026). If accepted, they would likely be added to the end of the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E block.

In closing, I look forward to continuing to chair both CJK & Unihan Working Group and IRG meetings, and attending more IRG and WG 2 meetings than in the past.

About the Author

Dr Ken Lunde has worked for Apple as a Font Developer since 2021-08-02 (and was in the same role as a contractor from 2020-01-16 through 2021-07-30), is the author of CJKV Information Processing Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2009), and earned BA (1987), MA (1988), and PhD (1994) degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to working at Apple, he worked at Adobe for over 28 years — from 1991-07-01 to 2019-10-18 — specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he architected and developed fonts for East Asian typefaces, along with the standards and specifications on which they are based. He architected and developed the Adobe-branded “Source Han” (Source Han Sans, Source Han Serif, and Source Han Mono) and Google-branded “Noto CJK” (Noto Sans CJK and Noto Serif CJK) open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019, and published over 300 articles on Adobe’s now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken serves as the Unicode Consortium’s IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) Registrar, attends UTC meetings, participates in the UTC Editorial Working Group, became an individual Unicode Life Member in 2018, received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award, was a Unicode Technical Director from 2018 to 2020, became a Vice-Chair of the Emoji Standard & Research Working Group in 2019, published UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property “kStrange”) in 2020, became the Chair of the CJK & Unihan Working Group in 2021, published UTN #45 (Unihan Property History) in 2022, published UTN #50 (KP-Source Property Value History) and UTN #53 (CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B, UCS2003 Reference Glyphs) in 2023, and published UTN #60 (Legacy Hangul Syllables Mappings) and was appointed as the new IRG (Ideographic Research Group) Convenor in 2024. He and his wife, Hitomi, are proud owners of a His & Hers pair of acceleration-boosted 2018 LR Dual Motor AWD Tesla Model 3 EVs.

I participated in the two-day Unicode and the Humanities conference that took place at Carnegie Mellon University on 2024-02-02 and 2024-02-03, which gave me an opportunity to revisit a fascinating topic that I explored over a dozen years ago. With BA (1987), MA (1988), and PhD (1994) degrees in linguistics, the conference also allowed me to reconnect with my roots in the humanities.

The paper that I submitted, Genuine Han Unification, was discussed during the conference, and as expected, the discussion was spirited. I wanted to share this paper more broadly, but it has typographic requirements that would make publishing it on Medium somewhat challenging. My solution was to use Adobe InDesign to export from the actual paper’s source file each of its 12 pages as a separate 300-dpi PNG file. In other words, the paper is presented here as 12 separate images. Some of the pages have blue hyperlinks that obviously cannot be clicked when the entire page is manifested as an image. These hyperlinks are shown immediately below each page

Enjoy!

About the Author

Dr Ken Lunde has worked for Apple as a Font Developer since 2021-08-02 (and was in the same role as a contractor from 2020-01-16 through 2021-07-30), is the author of CJKV Information Processing Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2009), and earned BA (1987), MA (1988), and PhD (1994) degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to working at Apple, he worked at Adobe for over 28 years — from 1991-07-01 to 2019-10-18 — specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he architected and developed fonts for East Asian typefaces, along with the standards and specifications on which they are based. He architected and developed the Adobe-branded “Source Han” (Source Han Sans, Source Han Serif, and Source Han Mono) and Google-branded “Noto CJK” (Noto Sans CJK and Noto Serif CJK) open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019, and published over 300 articles on Adobe’s now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken serves as the Unicode Consortium’s IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) Registrar, attends UTC and IRG meetings, participates in the Unicode Editorial Committee, became an individual Unicode Life Member in 2018, received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award, was a Unicode Technical Director from 2018 to 2020, became a Vice-Chair of the Emoji Subcommittee in 2019, published UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property “kStrange”) in 2020, became the Chair of the CJK & Unihan Group in 2021, published UTN #45 (Unihan Property History) in 2022, and published UTN #50 (KP-Source Property Value History) and UTN #53 (CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B, UCS2003 Reference Glyphs) in 2023. He and his wife, Hitomi, are proud owners of a His & Hers pair of acceleration-boosted 2018 LR Dual Motor AWD Tesla Model 3 EVs.

Happiness is probably the most accurate way to describe my feeling every time I have an opportunity to drive my Tesla Model 3, which I have been doing for more than five years. The instant acceleration, which was enhanced four years ago after I purchased the Acceleration Boost upgrade, has yet to get old.

My wife and I have now owned a pair of Tesla Model 3 EVs for over five years, which is a significant milestone. They are as enjoyable to drive as when we first bought them, and we can confidently state that they are better vehicles than when we first bought them, thanks to frequent over-the-air—and free—software updates that added new features and improved efficiencies.

It has been almost two years since I last published an article about our Tesla Model 3 ownership experience, and there have been enough changes to warrant this fourth article. The previous three articles, which I encourage you to read, are listed below:

• The Best Vehicle I Have Ever Owned
• Still The Best Vehicle I Have Ever Owned
• Tesla Model 3 ❤️🤍💙 Triplets

“The Love Bug”

Every vehicle has a story, and our first Model 3 certainly does now. As I mentioned at the end of the article entitled THIS IS TOSV: KEN LUNDE, which was published about a year and a half ago, I had been thinking to transform Baby Pearl into Herbie, which became a reality on 2023-09-15. The very talented crew at SS Customs in nearby Redwood City did an excellent job in making this dream come true:

You can read my review of their work here.

My wife returned from a trip to Japan the following Monday, and I nearly put her into shock when picking her up at SJC in Herbie. While Herbie is very iconic in American culture, he is not well known in Japan. Only after I told her the backstory, which is that Herbie is a sentient 1963 Volkswagen Beetle, did she start to warm up to him. Herbie is equipped with FSD Beta, so the analogy works quite well.

Herbie somehow managed to create his own 𝕏 (formerly Twitter) account. He also refers to Baby Ruby as his sister, and Baby Sapphire and Mochi as his nieces. You will learn about Mochi later in this article.

Continued Long-distance Driving

Road trips, particularly cross-country ones, are nothing new for me. I have been driving from our home in San José, California to my parents’ home in Hot Springs, South Dakota for nearly twenty years, and did so about twice a year. The drive is approximately 1,400 miles each way, and most of the route, to the tune of about 1,000 miles, is along Interstate 80.

When I published my previous article almost two years ago, I had driven my Model 3 to South Dakota and back four times: twice in 2019, once in 2020, and once in 2021. The single trips in 2020 and 2021 were due to COVID-19. I subsequently drove to South Dakota and back four additional times, meaning eight times thus far: twice in 2022 and twice in 2023. Sadly, the second trip in 2022 was to see my father for the last time, and the first trip in 2023 was to attend his memorial service.

The Passing of My Father

One of the more memorable trips to South Dakota was in June of 2022. I had just left Evanston, Wyoming when a low tire pressure warning suddenly appeared on the screen. I was bringing to South Dakota a new Apple iMac computer for my parents, along with a spare 32-inch Samsung monitor for me to use when I visit. I was effectively in the middle of nowhere, and I had nearly 100 miles to drive to the next Tesla Supercharger, which was in Rock Springs, Wyoming. While supercharging there, I managed to find the culprit: a Phillips-head screw in one of the tires. Luckily, it was a slow leak. I used this portable air pump to inflate the tire each time I stopped to supercharge, and was able to reach Hot Springs, South Dakota without difficulty. While there, I arranged to have all four tires replaced.

Among the Tesla Superchargers along my route to South Dakota, I still feel that the most scenic one is in Tooele, Utah.

When I travel, I still like to take photos of my Model 3 at interesting places.

Four in the Family

Behold the number of Tesla Model 3 EVs in our immediate family! My wife and I bought our pair in 2018. Our oldest son and his wife then bought one in August of 2019, which was named Baby Sapphire. This increased the number of Model 3s in our immediate family to three. Almost four years later, our daughter-in-law realized that she needed her own vehicle, and another Model 3 was the most compelling choice, both in terms of actual cost and functionality. They took delivery of Mochi, a 2023 Model 3 in Pearl White, at the end of July of this year. In other words, our immediate family now owns four Tesla Model 3s!

After our daughter-in-law stated that she would like to wrap Mochi in pink, I didn’t feel so bad about transforming Baby Pearl into Herbie.

Fonts

Interfaces, specifically user interfaces (UIs), are an important feature of Tesla EVs. Virtually all of the vehicle’s functionality is accessed via a touchscreen whose UI is available in a number of languages, including East Asian ones.

In the first article that I published almost four years ago, I suggested that Tesla should use the open source Source Han Sans or Noto Sans CJK Pan-CJK fonts, both of which I architected and developed while at Adobe, for the in-vehicle UI when the language is set to an East Asian one. Starting this year, Tesla began using the latter fonts, not only for the in-vehicle UI, but also for producing the PDF versions of their manuals. Of course, I was very pleased to see these developments.

My 28+ Years of #AdobeLife

Speaking of UIs, which are driven by software, my Model 3 has received 21 additional over-the-air software updates since the last article that I published almost two years ago, all of which were FSD Beta updates. As of this writing, both Herbie and Baby Ruby are on Version 2023.44.30.2 (aka FSD Beta Version 11.4.9).

Wrapping Up

Everything that I wrote in the three previous articles about our Tesla Model 3 ownership experience still applies today, so I encourage you to read those articles if you haven’t done so already.

As many of you may be aware, Tesla started to deliver the first Cybertrucks late last month, and I have seen three in the wild thus far. It is unclear as to when the Cybertruck that I ordered will be ready, but until then, I will continue to enjoy Herbie…

About the Author

Dr Ken Lunde has worked for Apple as a Font Developer since 2021-08-02 (and was in the same role as a contractor from 2020-01-16 through 2021-07-30), is the author of CJKV Information Processing Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2009), and earned BA (1987), MA (1988), and PhD (1994) degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to working at Apple, he worked at Adobe for over 28 years — from 1991-07-01 to 2019-10-18 — specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he architected and developed fonts for East Asian typefaces, along with the standards and specifications on which they are based. He architected and developed the Adobe-branded “Source Han” (Source Han Sans, Source Han Serif, and Source Han Mono) and Google-branded “Noto CJK” (Noto Sans CJK and Noto Serif CJK) open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019, and published over 300 articles on Adobe’s now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken serves as the Unicode Consortium’s IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) Registrar, attends UTC and IRG meetings, participates in the Unicode Editorial Committee, became an individual Unicode Life Member in 2018, received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award, was a Unicode Technical Director from 2018 to 2020, became a Vice-Chair of the Emoji Subcommittee in 2019, published UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property “kStrange”) in 2020, became the Chair of the CJK & Unihan Group in 2021, published UTN #45 (Unihan Property History) in 2022, and published UTN #50 (KP-Source Property Value History) and UTN #53 (CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B, UCS2003 Reference Glyphs) in 2023. He and his wife, Hitomi, are proud owners of a His & Hers pair of acceleration-boosted 2018 LR Dual Motor AWD Tesla Model 3 EVs.

Understanding a concept to the point that it becomes second nature requires a lot of focus and determination, which has led me quite far in my professional life. In other words, obsession can be a good thing.

I never imagined that I would author a book, let alone three (thus far—wink, wink). In this article, I am celebrating the 30th anniversary of my first book, Understanding Japanese Information Processing (O’Reilly & Associates, 1993), which was published 30 years ago this month, and on 1993-09-15, which is 30 years ago today, I received my first author copy. I had been working for Adobe—called Adobe Systems Incorporated at the time—for a little over two years. It was early on in my career there that sort of abruptly ended after more than 28 years. It also became one of those “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish” opportunities. 🐬

My 28+ Years of #AdobeLife

The book’s subtitle, 日本語情報処理 (nihongo jōhō shori), is simply the Japanese translation of Japanese information processing, which is also present on the book’s spine—and on the limited-edition T-shirt, and on the extremely limited-edition white and gray sweatshirts! It was set in the Heisei Kaku Gothic W5 (平成角ゴシックW5) typeface.

The book’s cover animal, which is a blowfish 🐡, was actually my idea. My publisher—or, more specifically, Edie Freedman—usually selects the cover animal for their books, but I was able to make a good case as to why my idea should be used. Instead of repeating all of the details here, you can read all about it in my article below:

“One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish”

The History

Japanese, or more specifically, how Japanese text was processed on computers, was a main focus early on in my professional life, which originally began while I was an undergraduate student at UW-Madison, meaning almost 40 years ago.

This obsession eventually led to the creation and distribution of an electronic information file called JAPAN.INF that was first released sometime in 1989. Version 1.1, which is dated 1991-08-19, is still available online. Version 1.2, which was available in Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, and ISO-2022-JP encodings, was the final version, and was dated 1992-03-20.

One thing led to another, and I eventually pitched a book idea to O’Reilly & Associates sometime in late 1992. Peter Mui, who was my editor, was very helpful and supportive during the entire process. Given the special nature of the book, Tim O’Reilly, the publisher’s founder, was also directly involved and offered his support. My original estimate was 250 pages. The book ended up becoming 470 pages.

I later created a new electronic information file called CJK.INF, which was an extension of JAPAN.INF that added details about Chinese and Korean, hence the name change. Version 1.0 was released on 1995-06-09, and Version 2.1, which was its final version, was released on 1996-07-12. Its WHAT HAPPENED TO JAPAN.INF? section states the following:

Put bluntly, JAPAN.INF died. It first evolved into my first book entitled “Understanding Japanese Information Processing” (this book is now into its second printing, and the Japanese translation was just published). After my book came out, I did attempt to update JAPAN.INF, but the effort felt a bit futile. I decided that something fresh was necessary.

JAPAN.INF also evolved into this document, which breaks the Japanese barrier by providing similar information on Chinese and Korean character sets and encodings. It fills the Chinese and Korean gap, so to speak. My specialty (and hobby, believe it or not) is the field of CJK character sets and encoding systems, so I felt that shifting this document more towards those lines was appropriate use of my (copious) free time (I wish there were more than 24 hours in a day!). Besides, this document now becomes useful to a much broader audience.

Of course, CJK.INF eventually led to my second book, CJKV Information Processing (O’Reilly & Associates, 1999), which was published at the very end of 1998.

The Writing

Information—or data—is an essential key that leads to understanding. How information is organized or presented can make all of the difference in terms of how well it will be understood. This was my very first major writing endeavor, which also turned into an excellent learning experience. All in all, it took approximately nine months to write the book.

In addition to writing the book, I also typeset its 470 pages using an Apple Macintosh IIci computer running Aldus PageMaker 4.0J, and produced camera-ready copy with a Linotronic L300-J imagesetter set at 1270-dpi resolution.

There is an “Advance Praise” page at the very beginning of the book, and I would like to draw attention to the very first quote:

“Adobe Systems understands the importance of providing our Japanese-speaking customers with Japanese-capable software. The issues are complex, but Ken Lunde is able to sort them out for the reader in Understanding Japanese information Processing. I expect this book to have a great impact in the field of software internationalization and localization. I feel quite fortunate having Ken Lunde on our staff at Adobe Systems.”

— Dr. John Warnock
CEO, Adobe Systems Incorporated

For those who were not aware, John Warnock passed away on 2023-08-19 at the age of 82.

The second quote is from an old friend, best known for his book entitled PostScript by Example, who passed away on 2022-05-27 at the age of 77:

“Creating multilingual software is a challenge in the growing global marketplace, and the task is especially daunting with Japanese—one of the world’s most difficult languages. Understanding Japanese Information Processing in the resource for developers building the bridge between Japanese and Western languages.”

— Henry McGilton
Trilithon Software

That page included two additional quotes, from Dr. Jun Murai and Professor Jim Breen. The same page in the second printing, which spilled over into two pages, included three additional quotes, from Jack Halpern, Dr. Joseph Becker, and Wolfgang Hadamitzky.

Returning to the topic of writing, after my first book was published, I then focused my attention on preparing my PhD dissertation, which was entitled Prescriptive Kanji Simplification, and was successfully defended on 1994-05-18. It had five pages of front matter followed by 70 pages for the dissertation proper. I was 28 years old, the same age when the book was published.

The Code Examples

Processing of Japanese text data is easily done using today’s platforms, mainly thanks to the proliferation of the Unicode Standard, but that wasn’t the case 30 years ago. Everything was very hands-on, and dealing with encoding conversion was the norm. Perl eventually became my preferred programming language, which I used for over 25 years before recently abandoning it in favor of Python. At the time that I wrote my first book, C was self-taught and fresh in my mind, so all of the programming code, which was encapsulated in Chapter 7, Japanese Information Processing Techniques, was written in C.

Based on the previous paragraph, my deep dive into using Perl led to the two subsequent books including 20-page or so appendixes entitled Perl Code Examples: Appendix W in CJKV Information Processing, and Appendix C in CJKV Information Processing, Second Edition.

In closing, my Better Half™ (aka my wonderful and supporting wife), whom I didn’t know at the time of the book’s publishing, once told me that it completely embarrassed the entire Japanese IT industry, because a completely non-Japanese person wrote the book that a Japanese person should have written.

Fate loves irony. Particularly when said irony occurs more than once.

Continuing on the topic of irony, the Japanese translation, which was aptly entitled 『日本語情報処理』(nihongo jōhō shori), was published less than two years later, on 1995-08-25. As you can see from the book’s cover below, its subtitle is the title of the original book, but only the Japanese title is shown on its spine:

The photo below shows the spines of all of my books and their translated version, and from top to bottom they are Understanding Japanese Information Processing (1993), its Japanese translation (1995), CJKV Information Processing (1999), its Japanese and (Traditional) Chinese translations (2002), and CJKV Information Processing, Second Edition (2009):

I will be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publishing of CJKV Information Processing (O’Reilly & Associates, 1999) in December of this year. I received my first author copy on 1998-12-17, so until then…

About the Author

Dr Ken Lunde has worked for Apple as a Font Developer since 2021-08-02 (and was in the same role as a contractor from 2020-01-16 through 2021-07-30), is the author of CJKV Information Processing Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2009), and earned BA (1987), MA (1988), and PhD (1994) degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to working at Apple, he worked at Adobe for over 28 years — from 1991-07-01 to 2019-10-18 — specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he architected and developed fonts for East Asian typefaces, along with the standards and specifications on which they are based. He architected and developed the Adobe-branded “Source Han” (Source Han Sans, Source Han Serif, and Source Han Mono) and Google-branded “Noto CJK” (Noto Sans CJK and Noto Serif CJK) open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019, and published over 300 articles on Adobe’s now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken serves as the Unicode Consortium’s IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) Registrar, attends UTC and IRG meetings, participates in the Unicode Editorial Committee, became an individual Unicode Life Member in 2018, received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award, was a Unicode Technical Director from 2018 to 2020, became a Vice-Chair of the Emoji Subcommittee in 2019, published UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property “kStrange”) in 2020, became the Chair of the CJK & Unihan Group in 2021, published UTN #45 (Unihan Property History) in 2022, and published UTN #50 (KP-Source Property Value History) in 2023. He and his wife, Hitomi, are proud owners of a His & Hers pair of acceleration-boosted 2018 LR Dual Motor AWD Tesla Model 3 EVs.

Unusual this year were several events that affected my standardization-related activities, along with the extent of my engagement. Unchanged, of course, is that I continue to serve as the Chair of the Unicode CJK & Unihan Group. This article, which is the fifth installment of a brief annual report that began its life in 2019, provides to CJK (Chinese, Japanese & Korean) and Unihan (Unicode Han) experts and enthusiasts a snapshot of the latest developments.

• 2022 "State of the Unification" Report
• 2021 "State of the Unification" Report
• 2020 "State of the Unification" Report

See 2019 “State of the Unification” Report for the original report that I published on Adobe’s long-static CJK Type Blog to which I contributed 300+ articles.

Unicode Version 15.1

Naturally, a new version of the Unicode Standard, Unicode Version 15.1, was successfully released on 2023-09-12. As the usual synopsis below illustrates, there are now 97,680 CJK Unified Ideographs in the Unicode Standard. New in Unicode Version 15.1 is the somewhat unexpected CJK Unified Ideographs Extension I block, which, unlike the the previous two extension blocks that were encoded in Plane 3 (aka TIP or Tertiary Ideographic Plane), is encoded in Plane 2 and includes only 622 ideographs.

Read the article below to learn how the Extension I block materialized into existence:

The First Amendment

In addition, and as mentioned in last year’s “State of the Unification” report, five new Ideographic Description Characters (IDCs) are included in Unicode Version 15.1:

As documented in UAX #38, there was a lot of churn among Unihan database properties, in terms of existing properties being removed and new properties being added:

• Seven existing provisional properties—kHKSCS, kIRGDaiKanwaZiten, kKPS0, kKPS1, kKSC0, kKSC1, and kRSKangXi—were removed, because they were determined to be redundant with other existing Unihan database properties.
• Six new provisional properties—kJapanese, kMojiJoho, kSMSZD2003Index, kSMSZD2003Readings, kVietnameseNumeric, and kZhuangNumeric—were added to the Unihan database.

In addition, the coverage of the existing kMorohashi property, which provides indexes into Japan’s Dai Kanwa Jiten (大漢和辞典) dictionary, was expanded, from just under 18,000 ideographs, to just over 49,000! That, combined with the new kJapanese and kMojiJoho properties that have comparable coverage, significantly increased the overall Japanese coverage in the Unihan database.

There were also some changes and improvements made to the code charts, such as the following:

• The code charts for the CJK Unified Ideographs (aka URO), Extension A, and Extension B blocks now include over 24,000 KP-source (aka DPRK or North Korea) ideographs.
• Directly related to the above, the code charts for the CJK Unified Ideographs block now accommodate seven columns.
• The code charts for the Kangxi Radicals and CJK Radicals Supplement blocks now include helpful annotations. The former now explicitly specify the radical number, from 1 (U+2F00 ⼀ KANGXI RADICAL ONE) to 214 (U+2FD5 ⿕ KANGXI RADICAL FLUTE), and the latter now explicitly specify what type of variant a radical is, and of what radical.

Speaking of Radicals 211 through 213:

The Road to ‘Ideograph Hell’…

The syntax of the kRSUnicode property was enhanced to accommodate non-Chinese simplified radicals. Chinese simplified radicals have been specified by a single apostrophe following the radical number, and non-Chinese simplified radicals can now be specified by two apostrophes following the radical number. The benefit of this enhancement is best visualized in the Radical-Stroke Index (46MB) whose annotated excerpt for Radical #211 is shown below:

Chinese simplified radicals are outlined in red, and non-Chinese simplified radicals are outlined in green. As you can see, the sorting order for any given radical-stroke value pair is 1) traditional; 2) Chinese simplified; and then 3) non-Chinese simplified. The other radical-stroke indexes, which are associated with the kIICore and kUnihanCore2020 properties, include the same enhancement, but they support a small subset of ideographs.

Four other related things were released on the same date that Unicode Version 15.1 itself was released:

• Version 2 of UTN (Unicode Technical Note) #43, Unihan Database Property “kStrange,” which was updated for Unicode Version 15.1.
• Version 3 of UTN #45, Unihan Property History, which was updated for Unicode Version 15.1.
• Version 2 of UTN #50, KP-Source Property Value History, which was updated for Unicode Version 15.1. This particular UTN was first published on 2023-01-23, and is meant to document changes to the kIRG_KPSource property for greater visibility for our friends in DPRK.
• Version 15.100 of the open source Last Resort fonts, which were updated for Unicode Version 15.1.

The Passing of John H. Jenkins

I lost a close friend and colleague on 2023-02-28, and the standardization community lost a world-renowned expert on all things CJK. John has been a friend for over two decades, and was also a colleague in two senses. In one sense, we became colleagues when I started working at Apple at the beginning of 2020. Interestingly, John joined Apple in 1991, and I joined Adobe during the same year.

My 28+ Years of #AdobeLife

In another sense, we worked together on CJK- and Unihan-related matters for the Unicode Consortium, with me serving as Chair of the CJK & Unihan Group, and John serving as Vice-Chair.

As a result of John’s unexpected passing, I necessarily took over all of his responsibilities for the Unicode Standard, which included becoming the primary co-editor of UAX #38, the editor of UAX #45, and the overall maintainer of the Unihan database. This meant more editing responsibility, along with learning how to update the assets for UAX #45, and updating the Unihan database, to include the version that is used for the online Unihan Database Lookup page. It was a huge learning experience, but I am happy to report that I now have all of the tools and processes under control, and used the opportunity to make improvements that should reduce the likelihood of errors in the future.

Lee Collins and I contributed to this Unicode Blog article that honors John and his contributions to the Unicode Standard. Please take a few minutes out of your busy schedule to read it.

UTC Meetings

Hopefully the trend of in-person UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) meetings will continue, and were thankfully the norm this year, though they are necessarily taking place in hybrid fashion, with some regular participants joining remotely. The UTC #174 meeting, hosted by Google in Sunnyvale, CA, took place in January, the UTC #175 meeting, hosted by Adobe in San José, CA, took place in April, and the UTC #176, hosted by Microsoft in Redmond, WA, took place in July. I attended all three meetings in person, and only the third one involved travel. The next meeting, UTC #177, hosted by Apple in Cupertino, CA, takes place at the very beginning of November.

To prepare for the UTC meetings, the CJK & Unihan Group met almost three weeks prior to each meeting, usually for a full three hours. As the chair of the meeting and group, I subsequently spent the entire weekend that followed preparing the CJK & Unihan Group Recommendations, which were presented during each UTC meeting.

The Unicode® CJK & Unihan Group

Unicode Version 16.0

All of the Unihan database changes that resulted from the UTC #175 and #176 meetings were necessarily deferred to Unicode Version 16.0 (2024), because there was risk associated with updating the Unihan database due to the passing of John H. Jenkins. He was the sole maintainer of the Unihan database. I was able to successfully restore the Unihan database on 2023-06-01, but because none of the changes were deemed critical, they continued to be deferred to Unicode Version 16.0. The only changes that were made to the Unihan database were the addition of the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension I block and a single kStrange property syntax correction.

Among the Unihan database changes that have been accumulating for Unicode 16.0, the following are two of the highlights:

• The new provisional kFanqie property, which covers over 20,000 ideographs, will be added. See document L2/23-002R and Section 14 on pp 22 and 23 of document L2/23-163 for more details.
• Japan submitted a horizontal extension to add over 36,000 new source references to the kIRG_JSource property using the existing “JMJ” source prefix. This horizontal extension was first suggested in the CJK Type Blog article entitled Unihan & Moji Jōhō Kiban Project: The Tip of the Iceberg that I published at the beginning of 2018. See document L2/23-144 (aka WG2 N5221) for more details.

IRG Working Set 2024?

New IRG working sets are typically initiated every three years or so, and given that the current IRG working set, IRG Working Set 2021, is nearing maturity for becoming the new CJK Unified Ideographs Extension J block, it is time to start considering a new IRG working set. I therefore predict that the next one will be designated IRG Working Set 2024.

The number of ideographs that have since been added to UAX #45, to include those that are in the pipeline to be added for Unicode Version 16.0, is below 200. That is likely to be the UTC’s submission size.

In closing, preparing for the UTC #177 meeting, which is scheduled to take place from 2023-11-01 through 2023-11-03 as another face-to-face meeting, is expected to be much less work than preparing for the UTC meetings that took place earlier this year. The CJK & Unihan Group meeting in preparation for the UTC #177 meeting is scheduled to take place on the evening of 2023-10-13.

About the Author

Dr Ken Lunde has worked for Apple as a Font Developer since 2021-08-02 (and was in the same role as a contractor from 2020-01-16 through 2021-07-30), is the author of CJKV Information Processing Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2009), and earned BA (1987), MA (1988), and PhD (1994) degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to working at Apple, he worked at Adobe for over 28 years — from 1991-07-01 to 2019-10-18 — specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he architected and developed fonts for East Asian typefaces, along with the standards and specifications on which they are based. He architected and developed the Adobe-branded “Source Han” (Source Han Sans, Source Han Serif, and Source Han Mono) and Google-branded “Noto CJK” (Noto Sans CJK and Noto Serif CJK) open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019, and published over 300 articles on Adobe’s now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken serves as the Unicode Consortium’s IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) Registrar, attends UTC and IRG meetings, participates in the Unicode Editorial Committee, became an individual Unicode Life Member in 2018, received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award, was a Unicode Technical Director from 2018 to 2020, became a Vice-Chair of the Emoji Subcommittee in 2019, published UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property “kStrange”) in 2020, became the Chair of the CJK & Unihan Group in 2021, published UTN #45 (Unihan Property History) in 2022, and published UTN #50 (KP-Source Property Value History) in 2023. He and his wife, Hitomi, are proud owners of a His & Hers pair of acceleration-boosted 2018 LR Dual Motor AWD Tesla Model 3 EVs.

Figuratively, of course.

As we shall see in this article, that road is also paved with a whole bunch of other ideographs. Considering that there are nearly 100K Han ideographs in the Unicode Standard, the topic is effectively a bottomless pit, or infinite tunnel…

I mean, heck (sorry, hell), there are three standard forms of the ideographs that represent those two creatures, along with an emoji for good measure:

Turtle: U+9F9C 龜, U+4E80 亀, U+9F9F 龟, U+1F422 🐢 TURTLE
Dragon: U+9F8D 龍, U+7ADC 竜, U+9F99 龙, U+1F409 🐉 DRAGON

Those are the traditional, Japanese simplified, and Chinese simplified ideographs, respectively.

What makes matters worse is that all six ideographs are also encoded in the Kangxi Radicals or CJK Radicals Supplement blocks at completely separate code points:

Turtle: U+2FD4 ⿔, U+2EF2 ⻲, U+2EF3 ⻳
Dragon: U+2FD3 ⿓, U+2EEF ⻯, U+2EF0 ⻰

We’re not done, because there are also instances of both in the CJK Compatibility Ideographs block:

Turtle: U+F907 龜, U+F908 龜, U+FACE 龜
Dragon: U+F9C4 龍

Naturally, it doesn’t stop there, hence the entire point of this somewhat brief article.

Turtles

Case in point, a non-trivial number of turtles are present at the end of the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B (nine), CJK Unified Ideographs Extension E (one), and CJK Unified Ideographs Extension F (five) blocks, and their code chart excerpts are shown below:

We can even find several turtle specimens in the registered Moji_Joho IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) collection as unifiable variants of U+9F9C 龜:

Dragons

Just like with turtles, and in keeping with the title of this article, there is something comparable for dragons (aka U+9F8D 龍) in the same IVD collection:

However, unlike there being a myriad of encoded variants of turtle, dragon—including its Chinese simplified form—exhibits multiplicity, as evidenced by the the five ideographs whose code chart excerpts are shown below:

Note that U+2EE5D is in the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension I block, which will be included in Unicode Version 15.1 that will be released next month.

The First Amendment

The others are in the CJK Unified Ideographs (two), CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B (one), and CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G (one) blocks.

In terms of future repertoires, there is even a half dragon in IRG Working Set 2021, specifically at Serial Number 00005. This IRG working set is expected to become the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension J block, and in terms of its standardization timeframe, my best guess is Unicode Version 17.0 (2025).

Clouds, Dragons & Teeth

Knowing that U+3106C in the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension G block has 84 strokes, and consists of three clouds and three dragons, is a wonderful problem to have (hint: the image below is animated):

Did I mention teeth? Interestingly, the greater the simplification, the less teeth there appear to be:

Teeth: U+9F52 齒, U+6B6F 歯, U+9F7F 齿

Besides the three standard forms that mirror those for turtle and dragon, I found the following three gems in the CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B (two) and CJK Unified Ideographs Extension F (one) blocks:

I could go on and on, but I won’t. I covered only Radicals 211 through 213, so the topic is genuinely deep.

For those who would like to explore this topic further, a good place to start is UTN (Unicode Technical Note) #43, which documents the provisional kStrange property of the Unihan database that was added in Unicode Version 14.0 (2021).

About the Author

Dr Ken Lunde has worked for Apple as a Font Developer since 2021-08-02 (and was in the same role as a contractor from 2020-01-16 through 2021-07-30), is the author of CJKV Information Processing Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2009), and earned BA (1987), MA (1988), and PhD (1994) degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to working at Apple, he worked at Adobe for over twenty-eight years — from 1991-07-01 to 2019-10-18 — specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he architected and developed fonts for East Asian typefaces, along with the standards and specifications on which they are based. He architected and developed the Adobe-branded “Source Han” (Source Han Sans, Source Han Serif, and Source Han Mono) and Google-branded “Noto CJK” (Noto Sans CJK and Noto Serif CJK) open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019, and published over 300 articles on Adobe’s now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken serves as the Unicode Consortium’s IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) Registrar, attends UTC and IRG meetings, participates in the Unicode Editorial Committee, became an individual Unicode Life Member in 2018, received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award, was a Unicode Technical Director from 2018 to 2020, became a Vice-Chair of the Emoji Subcommittee in 2019, published UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property “kStrange”) in 2020, became the Chair of the CJK & Unihan Group in 2021, published UTN #45 (Unihan Property History) in 2022, and published UTN #50 (KP-Source Property Value History) in 2023. He and his wife, Hitomi, are proud owners of a His & Hers pair of acceleration-boosted 2018 LR Dual Motor AWD Tesla Model 3 EVs.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Wait… Hold on. Full stop!

While that is clearly the text of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, it is certainly not the first amendment that is the subject of this particular standardization-related article.

This article is about the not-yet-published first amendment of the GB 18030-2022 standard that itself was published almost one year ago in a country far, far away…

The GB 18030-2022 Standard

I have been working with China’s GB standards for well over three decades, and as far as I am aware, this is the very first time that an amendment was prepared for one. At least, that statement appears to be valid for the GB standards that are related to character sets and encodings.

As stated on page 14 of CJKV Information Processing, Second Edition, GB stands for Guo Biao (国标 guóbiāo), which is short for Guojia Biaozhun (国家标准 guójiā biāozhǔn), and simply means “National Standard.”

This article will cover the details and ramifications of this not-yet-published GB 18030-2022 amendment.

The First Draft

China made the first draft of this GB 18030-2022 amendment available for review sometime during the end of last year, and that is when I became aware of it. For those who would like to peruse the first draft of this amendment, please see document L2/23-113.

The CJK & Unihan Group recommendations for the UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) #174 meeting that took place in January of this year, specifically document L2/23-011, included in Section 18 on pp 23 and 24 the following three bullets that summarize the first draft:

• Adds the ideographs that have been subsequently appended to the URO (16: 9FF0..9FFF), Extension A (10: 4DB6..4DBF), Extension B (9: 2A6D7..2A6DF), and Extension C (5: 2B735..2B739), along with Extensions G and H in their entirety. This will synchronize GB 18030-2022 with Unicode Version 15.0, in terms of CJK Unified Ideograph coverage. (For those who are not aware, GB 18030-2022 proper is synchronized with Unicode Version 11.0.) Amending GB 18030 to synchronize with Unicode Version 15.0 is a good thing. At the same time, the Working Draft specifies the same implementation deadline of 2023-08-01 to support Extension G (4,939 ideographs) and Extension H (4,192 ideographs) at Implementation Level 3. This would likely be problematic for developers who are already burdened with supporting CJK Unified Ideographs through Extension F by the 2023-08-01 deadline. A longer lead time for development should be provided.
• Adds the 26 ideographs that have been appended to the URO (16: 9FF0..9FFF) and Extension A (10: 4DB6..4DBF) to the scope of Implementation Level 1, meaning that they will be required. Ken Lunde predicted that this would happen, though Ken didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. This is a good thing.
• Adds 897 ideographs, described as 公安人口信息专用字库补充汉字 (supplementary Chinese characters of the special font for population information used by public security departments), to the beginning of Plane 10 (A0000..A0380) whose code points are currently unallocated. This is an extraordinarily bad thing.

The Unicode® CJK & Unihan Group

The changes that are described in the first two bullets were predictable, at least for a future version of the GB 18030 standard, and other than the burden for developers to support Extensions G and H in Implementation Level 3, are considered welcome changes. However, encoding an unvetted repertoire of 897 ideographs in an unallocated plane destabilizes the normative relationship between the GB 18030 and ISO/IEC 10646 standards. It also circumvents the international standardization process.

The 897 Plane 10 ideographs in the first draft whose code point range is U+A0000..U+A0380 are shown below:

The first that struck me as odd was that the ordering of the repertoire was seemingly random, and not according to the standard convention that uses indexing radical followed by the number of residual strokes (aka radical-stroke order).

The First Response

Exceptional circumstances require exceptional responses. I was tasked by the UTC to prepare feedback to China on the first draft of this amendment, which became document L2/23-057. The working assumption was that China was simply not aware that unallocated planes should not be used, and merely required feedback stating so. The following five recommendations were conveyed to China via that document:

• Remove altogether from this draft amendment the repertoire of 897 characters in Plane 10 in order to preserve synchronization with the ISO/IEC 10646 standard. For implementations that have an immediate need to support this repertoire of 897 characters, they should be mapped to code points that correspond to one of the three PUA (Private Use Area) blocks. Furthermore, these PUA characters should not be documented in this amendment. After more than 17 years, GB 18030-2022 finally removed the PUA requirement from this standard, so establishing a new PUA requirement, particularly for a large number of characters, is fundamentally a step backwards.
• Remove from the repertoire of 897 characters any character that is already encoded.
• Remove from the repertoire of 897 characters any character that is unifiable with an existing character in a CJK Unified Ideographs block according to IRG rules. These characters can be represented in “plain text” as registered IVSes (Ideographic Variation Sequences) in a new IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) collection according to the procedures described in UTS #37, Unicode Ideographic Variation Database.
• Remove from the repertoire of 897 characters any character that is currently in the pipeline for encoding, meaning that the character is in IRG Working Set 2021.
• Submit to the IRG as a UNC (Urgently Needed Character) repertoire according to IRG Principles and Procedures (aka IRG N2515) all remaining characters in the repertoire of 897 characters.

So far, so good… 🤞

The Second Draft

Subsequently, China made the second draft of this GB 18030-2022 amendment available for review at the beginning of March of this year, which included the disposition of comments against the first draft. For those who would like to peruse the second draft of this amendment and the disposition of comments against the first draft, please see document L2/23-110. The following are the two most important points from the second draft:

• None of the recommendations as conveyed in document L2/23-057 were adopted.
• The Plane 10 repertoire shrunk to 614 ideographs.

The CJK & Unihan Group concluded that China fully intends to encode several hundred unvetted ideographs in an accelerated fashion, so I recommended that a small group of IRG (Ideographic Research Group) experts vet the repertoire, and propose a new CJK Unified Ideographs Extension I block as a compromise solution that adheres to the standardization process to the extent possible, but also recognizes the urgent nature of these ideographs.

The 614 Plane 10 ideographs in the second draft whose code point ranges are U+A0000..U+A0259 and U+A0270..U+A027B are shown below (the 22 code points that are between those two code point ranges are represented with a full-width space):

The Second Response

Ideographs, particularly when they are in a large repertoire, require vetting by multiple experts, and we did precisely that for the 614 Plane 10 ideographs in the second draft of the amendment. This was a one-month process that also involved establishing the required kIRG_GSource, kRSUnicode, and kTotalStrokes property values. In essence, 13 ideographs were removed from the second draft repertoire, and two ideographs were restored from the first draft repertoire, which resulted in a repertoire of 603 ideographs. The proposed Extension I block (U+2EBF0..U+2EE4F) is in Plane 2 (aka SIP or Supplementary Ideographic Plane), and the code point range is U+2EBF0..U+2EE4A. See document L2/23-106 for more details. The 603 Extension I ideographs are shown below:

The UTC accepted the Extension I block for Unicode Version 15.1 per Consensus 175-C10 during the UTC #175 meeting that took place at the end of April. The next step was to add Extension I to ISO/IEC 10646:2020 Amendment 2, which can be seen in document L2/23-146. Document L2/23-114, which includes the same repertoire of 603 ideographs, was discussed during the joint ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2 #28 and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2 #70 meetings at in June, and was formally supported by the national bodies of Japan, the Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom. China was subsequently tasked to provide feedback on the Extension I repertoire by the end of June. China’s feedback (see document L2/23-154) was submitted on 2023-06-30, and resulted in an updated Extension I repertoire. See document L2/23-114R, which proposes a slightly expanded Extension I block (U+2EBF0..U+2EE5F) and includes 622 ideographs in the code point range U+2EBF0..U+2EE5D. Compared to the previous repertoire of 603 ideographs, 47 ideographs were removed and 66 ideographs from the first draft were restored. The 622 Extension I ideographs are shown below:

The updated Extension I repertoire will be discussed during the UTC #176 meeting that takes place at the end of this month, and the UTC is expected to accept it for Unicode Version 15.1. This topic is covered in the CJK & Unihan Group recommendations for the UTC #176 meeting, specifically in Section 01 on pp 1 and 2 of document L2/23-163.

ADDED on 2023-08-30: As expected, the UTC accepted the updated 622-ideograph Extension I repertoire on 2023-07-25 during the UTC #176 meeting per Consensus 176-C1, and its repertoire and ordering are now frozen and stable for Unicode Version 15.1.

ADDED on 2024-10-09: GB 18030-2022 Amendment 1 (信息技术 中文编码字符集《第1号修改单》) was published on 2024-09-29. Click here to directly download the 54-page PDF file (19MB). Compared to GB 18030-2022 proper, the following are the changes that take effect with Amendment 1:

• The following ideographs that have been appended to existing CJK Unified Ideographs blocks have been added to the scope of Implementation Level 3:

URO: U+9FF0 through U+9FFF (16 ideographs)
Extension A: U+4DB6 through U+4DBF (10 ideographs)
Extension B: U+2A6D7 through U+2A6DF (9 ideographs)
Extension C: U+2B735 through U+2B739 (5 ideographs)

• The following CJK Unified Ideographs blocks have been added to the scope of Implementation Level 3:

Extension G (4,939 ideographs)
Extension H (4,192 ideographs)
Extension I (622 ideographs)

• The following four Mongolian Free Variation Selectors were added:

U+180B MONGOLIAN FREE VARIATION SELECTOR ONE
U+180C MONGOLIAN FREE VARIATION SELECTOR TWO
U+180D MONGOLIAN FREE VARIATION SELECTOR THREE
U+180F MONGOLIAN FREE VARIATION SELECTOR FOUR

• The following five modern hangul syllables were added:

U+B233 눳
U+BBC3 믃
U+C15B 셛
U+C4D5 쓕
U+C739 윹

• 36 characters in the CJK Strokes block were added, though the two that were added in Unicode Version 16.0, U+31E4 and U+31E5, are not included:

U+31C0 ㇀ CJK STROKE T
U+31C1 ㇁ CJK STROKE WG
U+31C2 ㇂ CJK STROKE XG
U+31C3 ㇃ CJK STROKE BXG
U+31C4 ㇄ CJK STROKE SW
U+31C5 ㇅ CJK STROKE HZZ
U+31C6 ㇆ CJK STROKE HZG
U+31C7 ㇇ CJK STROKE HP
U+31C8 ㇈ CJK STROKE HZWG
U+31C9 ㇉ CJK STROKE SZWG
U+31CA ㇊ CJK STROKE HZT
U+31CB ㇋ CJK STROKE HZZP
U+31CC ㇌ CJK STROKE HPWG
U+31CD ㇍ CJK STROKE HZW
U+31CE ㇎ CJK STROKE HZZZ
U+31CF ㇏ CJK STROKE N
U+31D0 ㇐ CJK STROKE H
U+31D1 ㇑ CJK STROKE S
U+31D2 ㇒ CJK STROKE P
U+31D3 ㇓ CJK STROKE SP
U+31D4 ㇔ CJK STROKE D
U+31D5 ㇕ CJK STROKE HZ
U+31D6 ㇖ CJK STROKE HG
U+31D7 ㇗ CJK STROKE SZ
U+31D8 ㇘ CJK STROKE SWZ
U+31D9 ㇙ CJK STROKE ST
U+31DA ㇚ CJK STROKE SG
U+31DB ㇛ CJK STROKE PD
U+31DC ㇜ CJK STROKE PZ
U+31DD ㇝ CJK STROKE TN
U+31DE ㇞ CJK STROKE SZZ
U+31DF ㇟ CJK STROKE SWG
U+31E0 ㇠ CJK STROKE HXWG
U+31E1 ㇡ CJK STROKE HZZZG
U+31E2 ㇢ CJK STROKE PG
U+31E3 ㇣ CJK STROKE Q

• The five new IDCs (Ideographic Description Characters) that were introduced in Unicode Version 15.1 were added:

U+2FFC IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER SURROUND FROM RIGHT
U+2FFD IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER SURROUND FROM LOWER RIGHT
U+2FFE IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER HORIZONTAL REFLECTION
U+2FFF IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER ROTATION
U+31EF IDEOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION CHARACTER SUBTRACTION

• The mappings for 31 通用规范汉字表 (aka “TGH 2013”) ideographs in Appendix E were corrected.
• Implementations are no longer required to remove mappings for 24 PUA code points and nine CJK Compatibility Ideographs that were previously required according to GB 18030-2005 (aka Second Edition).
• The mappings that were recommend by the UTC in document L2/23–003R are now accepted.
• It is important to note that there were no changes to the repertoires of Implementation Levels 1 and 2.

My high-level analysis of this GB 18030-2022 amendment can be summarized in the following two bullet points:

• Implementation Level 1 and Implementation Level 2 will become relatively stable. The URO and Extension A blocks became full as of Unicode Version 14.0 (2021) and Version 13.0 (2020), respectively, and the subsequent change to the former implementation level will be reflected in this amendment. The latter implementation level will not change.
• Implementation Level 3 is a genuine moving target. The GB 18030-2022 amendment, once published, is expected to add the Extension G, Extension H, and Extension I blocks. This means that developers who choose—or need—to support this implementation level are effectively on the hook to support any subsequent extension blocks. The next extension block, Extension J, will be the result of IRG Working Set 2021, which is in the final stages of standardization.

In terms of fonts that support the implementation levels as updated according to this GB 18030-2022 amendment, as of this writing, only Apple’s PingFangSC system fonts, starting from the versions included in iOS Version 16.4, iPadOS Version 16.4, macOS Ventura Version 13.2, tvOS Version 16.4, and watchOS Version 9.4, all of which were released on 2023-03-27, are already compliant with Implementation Level 2.

About the Author

Dr Ken Lunde has worked for Apple as a Font Developer since 2021-08-02 (and was in the same role as a contractor from 2020-01-16 through 2021-07-30), is the author of CJKV Information Processing Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2009), and earned BA (1987), MA (1988), and PhD (1994) degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to working at Apple, he worked at Adobe for over twenty-eight years — from 1991-07-01 to 2019-10-18 — specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he architected and developed fonts for East Asian typefaces, along with the standards and specifications on which they are based. He architected and developed the Adobe-branded “Source Han” (Source Han Sans, Source Han Serif, and Source Han Mono) and Google-branded “Noto CJK” (Noto Sans CJK and Noto Serif CJK) open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019, and published over 300 articles on Adobe’s now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken serves as the Unicode Consortium’s IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) Registrar, attends UTC and IRG meetings, participates in the Unicode Editorial Committee, became an individual Unicode Life Member in 2018, received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award, was a Unicode Technical Director from 2018 to 2020, became a Vice-Chair of the Emoji Subcommittee in 2019, published UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property “kStrange”) in 2020, became the Chair of the CJK & Unihan Group in 2021, published UTN #45 (Unihan Property History) in 2022, and published UTN #50 (KP-Source Property Value History) in 2023. He and his wife, Hitomi, are proud owners of a His & Hers pair of acceleration-boosted 2018 LR Dual Motor AWD Tesla Model 3 EVs.

Reality sets in, and the meaning of the title of this article became crystal clear to me due to events that transpired early this year.

Although 2023 has barely begun, its first month was very difficult for our family.

First, our tuxedo cat, Pocky (ポッキー), whom we adopted in December of 2007 at the age of two months, passed away on 2023-01-10. He was over 15 years old, and although we did not know what ailment was afflicting him, as soon as we realized that he was suffering, we brought him to the vet so that he could be euthanized. My wife and I were with him, and our daughter, who lives and works in Seattle, joined via LINE video chat. We all cried.

Then, to make matters worse, and less than two weeks later, our German Shepherd Dog, Lucky (ラッキー), whom we adopted in April of 2012, also at the age of two months, was diagnosed with high-grade/aggressive (aka terminal) lymphoma. She was given four to six weeks to live. We celebrated her 11th birthday on 2023-02-27. We started to give her oral steroids on 2023-02-22 to mitigate the spread of the cancer, but they stopped having any effect after about three weeks. Although it was almost eight weeks, she passed away at our home, in our backyard (her favorite place), on 2023-03-18 at 7:35AM. I was with her. My wife and daughter, who were in Japan at the time, had a LINE video chat with Lucky a little over thirty minutes before she passed. I cried throughout the day. I was crying while writing this article.

Choco Lunde & Pocky Lunde

Inexplicably and somewhat out of the blue, we adopted two cats — siblings — in December of 2007. They were born in early October of that year, and their names were Chester (longhair black) and Oliver (shorthair tuxedo). We renamed them Choco (チョコ) and Pocky (ポッキー). Our daughter, who was seven years old at the time, was ecstatic. Pocky was named after the Japanese snack of the same name, because he had white legs and a black body. Choco was very cautious and reserved, while Pocky was curious and clumsy. They were always together. Choco always looked after Pocky.

Sadly, Choco had to be euthanized on 2008-10-10, shortly after turning one year old. We think that he was run over or hit by a car, and had quite severe internal damage. He was euthanized to end his suffering. My wife and I were with him. The same doctor who euthanized Choco also euthanized Pocky over 14 years later.

For a time, its seemed as though Pocky would look for Choco, wondering where he had gone, but eventually life went on. Pocky was both an indoor and outdoor cat. He loved the comfort of home, but also enjoyed the outdoors and patrolling the neighborhood. And like me, he enjoyed hunting: two rabbits, several birds, countless rats, a couple of squirrels, lizards, and even a bat or two. He also got into fights with other cats in our neighborhood. One time, he and another cat were fighting on our pool deck, and both ended up falling into the pool.

Pocky’s eating habits changed sometime during the last half of 2022. He no longer liked hard food, and even his favorite wet food no longer could be eaten. Things progressively became worse late in the year. We wanted him to pass peacefully in our home, but his suffering necessitated a visit to the vet in early January of this year.

Lucky Lunde

Pets tend to multiply. We adopted Lucky (ラッキー), whose birth name was Bella, on 2012-04-28. She was born on 2012-02-27, and was from a litter of about eight pups. The Christmas card that I gave my daughter on Christmas Day of the previous year included a note that indicated that we would get a dog. Apparently, German Shepherd Dogs have a gestation period of approximately two months, so something magical may have transpired as a result of that message.

Lucky enjoyed laying in our backyard, either on the grass or on our patio. She also liked to lay on our leather couch, sometimes in awkward positions.

Lucky was very attached to our family. She enjoyed taking rides, and accompanied me to South Dakota more than a dozen times, first in our 2006 Infiniti FX35, and then in our 2016 Mazda CX-5. Even after returning from a 1,400-mile ride, she would be eager to get another ride, even the very next day!

Our grandson became quite attached to Lucky as he grew older, and they often played together in our backyard.

Lucky had several favorite foods. Chicken was her favorite, but she also enjoyed beef, sweet potatoes, carrots, cucumbers (Persian or Japanese), watermelon, and even dorayaki (どら焼き).

Lucky understood a remarkable number of words—in both English and Japanese—meaning that we needed to be careful what we said, otherwise she would set certain expectations, such as going for a ride or getting a treat.

Lucky’s first medical issue was hypothyroidism, which was diagnosed in August of 2020. She was gaining weight for no apparent reason, and we discovered her condition after having her blood tested (for the first time in her life). The heaviest that she weighed was 98.8 pounds. Less than three months later, after starting to take Levothyroxine, her weight dropped to 76.1 pounds. Her weight stabilized at about 65 pounds in early 2021.

After she was diagnosed with terminal lymphoma early this year, we decided to make every day special for her, to improve her quality of life. She would normally walk five or six miles per day, which was done in three separate walks. Her walks became shorter and slower, and during her last month we let her decide where and how far to walk. She got frequent rides in “Lucky Truck,” a 2009 Toyota Tacoma pickup truck that was gifted to us by my late father last November. Her last ride was on 2023-03-16, two days before her passing. I could tell that while her mind was excited about having a ride, her body was not.

2009 Toyota Tacoma 🛻: An Unexpected Non-EV Sibling

Although I was able to observe subtle changes in Lucky’s behavior during her last two months, a big change occurred on the evening of 2023-03-15, the day before her passing: she didn’t finish her dinner, and she insisted on staying outside. This was the first time that Lucky didn’t finish her dinner. I placed her favorite mat, covered with her favorite blanket, on our patio, and she eventually moved there. I placed a water bowl and a food bowl (filled with soft chicken meat in broth, which was her favorite), but she didn’t touch either. I checked on her at 2 and 3AM, and she was still breathing, and still on the mat. When I woke up shortly before 5AM, she had moved to the concrete, and while I won’t go into the details, it became clear that her digestive system had completely shut down. The photo below was taken about an hour before her passing:

At approximately 7:35AM, her body began twitching, and some red-colored liquid that didn’t look like blood came out of her mouth. She was gone only seconds later. I was planning to call the vet when they opened at 8AM so that she could be euthanized, but she had already passed. I carefully placed her on her favorite blanket, wrapped her in it, then carried her to the bed of “Lucky Truck” for her final ride to the vet so that she could be cremated. This was so very painful to experience.

My late father once told me that his father’s nickname was “Lucky Lunde,” because he was very good at playing cards, so he was very fond of Lucky, and also treated her like family. He was the only one who let Lucky lick a dinner—or dessert—plate.

The Passing of My Father

Loved Ones & Family Members

We treated Pocky and Lucky—and Choco, although short-lived—as genuine members of our family. Pocky and Lucky became even closer to us over the years. Although it took effort to care for them, no one in our family regretted it for an instant.

At times, Lucky would get jealous when Pocky would jump onto one of our laps, and Pocky would tease Lucky while she is waiting to be served dinner. We liked to say that they had their fair share of “Tom and Jerry” moments.

We went so far as to create Twitter accounts for Pocky and Lucky in 2012: @PockyLunde and @LuckyLunde.

Unlike most dogs, Lucky never completely learned to play ball. Whenever we threw a ball to her, she would not want to let it go. In her later years, she sometimes—and quite reluctantly—let the ball go so that we could throw it again. She simply loved having a ball.

We shall miss our pets. Saying goodbye to them is painful, which is why they are truly our loved ones and genuine family members. Their memories shall live on in us. And yes, we shall have pets again. And yes, we know that we will necessarily endure the experience of eventually losing them. The warmth and joy that they bring to our lives is without measure.

About the Author

Dr Ken Lunde has worked for Apple as a Font Developer since 2021-08-02 (and was in the same role as a contractor from 2020-01-16 through 2021-07-30), is the author of CJKV Information Processing Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2009), and earned BA (1987), MA (1988), and PhD (1994) degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to working at Apple, he worked at Adobe for over twenty-eight years — from 1991-07-01 to 2019-10-18 — specializing in CJKV Type Development, meaning that he architected and developed fonts for East Asian typefaces, along with the standards and specifications on which they are based. He architected and developed the Adobe-branded “Source Han” (Source Han Sans, Source Han Serif, and Source Han Mono) and Google-branded “Noto CJK” (Noto Sans CJK and Noto Serif CJK) open source Pan-CJK typeface families that were released in 2014, 2017, and 2019, and published over 300 articles on Adobe’s now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken serves as the Unicode Consortium’s IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) Registrar, attends UTC and IRG meetings, participates in the Unicode Editorial Committee, became an individual Unicode Life Member in 2018, received the 2018 Unicode Bulldog Award, was a Unicode Technical Director from 2018 to 2020, became a Vice-Chair of the Emoji Subcommittee in 2019, published UTN #43 (Unihan Database Property “kStrange”) in 2020, became the Chair of the CJK & Unihan Group in 2021, published UTN #45 (Unihan Property History) in 2022, and published UTN #50 (KP-Source Property Value History) in 2023. He and his wife, Hitomi, are proud owners of a His & Hers pair of acceleration-boosted 2018 LR Dual Motor AWD Tesla Model 3 EVs.