“CJKV Information Processing” Second Edition: Easter Eggs & Amusements
By Dr Ken Lunde, Janitor, Spirits of Christmas Past
For those who own or are otherwise familiar with my book, CJKV Information Processing Second Edition, which was published by O’Reilly Media at the end of 2008, this article should be interesting, and with any luck, possibly entertaining.
In addition to writing the entire book, I also typeset all of its pages using Adobe InDesign CS3, except for its cover. This included compiling its 26-page Index. (As an aside that I still find to be amusing to this date, I wrote a two-page and very detailed white paper entitled “User Report: Adobe InDesign CS3 for Book Publishing” the month after the book was published, which pointed out various shortcomings of using this app for serious book publishing. It was apparently so revealing that Adobe Legal immediately classified that white paper as “Adobe Confidential.” In other words, I cannot share it.)
Anyway, being the sole author, production editor (aka typesetter), and indexer provided to me a unique opportunity to inject bits of humor into various parts of the book, along with obscure or hidden messages. In other words, I had a lot of fun along the way. While this article is not a complete account of the Easter eggs (イースター・エッグ in Japanese) and other tidbits that one may find in its 900+ pages, some of the more memorable ones are highlighted here. In other words, this article should not be considered a comprehensive catalog of the gems that readers may come across in my book.
We start with page xxv in the Preface. The first letter of the first word of the first four paragraphs form an abbreviation that readers should probably recognize: CJKV
Every chapter in the book is the same, meaning that the first letter of the first word of the first few paragraphs form an abbreviation, or spell a particular word or name.
Chapter 1: HELLO
Chapter 2: RMK (the clue to what this abbreviation means can be found in the Glossary on page 786)
Chapter 3: INFI (the clue to what this abbreviation means can be found in the Glossary on page 772)
Chapter 4: (the same as Chapter 3)
In my defense, I was very much into a couple particular brands of knives while I was writing the book, which explains Chapter 2 through 4.
Chapter 5: IME (Input Method Editor)
Chapter 6: OTF (OpenType Font)
Chapter 7: TYPE
Chapter 8: IRG (Ideographic Research Group)
Chapter 9: RUBY (my daughter’s given name)
Chapter 10: HITOMI (my wife’s given name)
Chapter 11: EDWARD (my youngest son’s given name)
Chapter 12: TTFN
The last portion of the highlighted text from page xxvi of the Preface is a reference to The X-Files television series:
The highlighted text below is from page xxxiii of the Preface:
I was apparently the only Adobe employee—at least in its downtown San José headquarters—who once had pronghorn antelope trophies mounted on his office wall.
The footnote on page xxxiv of the Preface conveys Michael Slinn’s suggestion for an alternate cover animal, which arguably made a whole bunch of sense:
The first footnote on page 15 in Chapter 1 comes from an observation that I made while using the men’s restroom at Morisawa’s Osaka headquarters during one of my visits:
The second and third footnotes on page 17 in Chapter 1 should be mildly amusing, in particular the “S32S” reference in the second one. Clues can be found on page 787 in the Glossary, and on page 859 in the Index.
The footnote on page 28 in Chapter 1 includes a Star Trek: The Next Generation reference:
The title of that particular episode, 11001001, is binary notation, and represents 0xC9 in hexadecimal and 201 in decimal. Its Unicode character would therefore be U+00C9 É LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH ACUTE. The meaning is actually a contraction of the names of the Bynars who appeared in the episode: One One, Zero Zero, One Zero, and Zero One.
The footnote on page 52 in Chapter 2 is not humorous per se, but does explain why typical Chinese and Korean fonts cannot completely render Japanese text, specifically referring to the lack of support of the frequently-used U+30FC ー KATAKANA-HIRAGANA PROLONGED SOUND MARK character that is used in イースター・エッグ (Easter egg) among other words written using katakana:
The following paragraph on page 149 in Chapter 3 continues to make me wonder when the KPS 9566 standard will be revised to include the three hangul syllables 김정은:
No one outside of DPRK has seen an actual KPS standard, which means that I am not holding my breath.
The footnote on page 177 in Chapter 3 refers to the word assume as an acronym:
Quite true.
The bottom of page 183 in Chapter 3 includes yet another reference from The X-Files:
The footnotes on pp 202, 205, 209, and 211 in Chapter 4 are all connected:
The URL on page 209 has since become stale, which is sadly true of many of the URLs that can be found in my book’s many footnotes.
The first and second footnotes on page 262 in Chapter 4 are meant to be somewhat entertaining, especially the second one:
There is a chunk of Base64-encoded text on page 293 in Chapter 4:
It decodes as follows: I am wondering how many people will actually type this in to find out what it says. Well, it doesn’t say much.
The first and second footnotes on page 329 in Chapter 5 include television and movie references:
The footnote on page 348 in Chapter 5 is in reference to there having been books written using a mobile phone as their sole means of input:
Interestingly, doing so today does not feel to be quite so outlandish.
The first footnote on page 380 in Chapter 6 began its life in my first book, Understanding Japanese Information Processing (O’Reilly Media, 1993), and grew larger in each subsequent book to the point that it literally takes up half the page:
The first footnote on page 382 in Chapter 6 is a reference to an anecdotal full form of the OCF (Original Composite Font) abbreviation:
The second and third footnotes on page 452 in Chapter 6 are meant to be amusing:
The section title on page 459 in Chapter 6 is a derivation of the infamous All your base are belong to us quote, and the third footnote is meant to be amusing:
The second footnote on page 478 in Chapter 7 includes Star Trek: The Next Generation and James Bond references:
For those who are unaware, the character “Q” in James Bond movies stands for quartermaster.
The fifth footnote on page 641 in Chapter 10 is a reference to Wine (WINdows Emulator):
The sixth footnote on page 716 in Chapter 12 includes a quote from Alien: Resurrection:
The footnote on page 737 in Appendix C refers to my daughter who is now a college student:
If you read the entire article and enjoyed it, and if you have access to my book, I encourage you to peruse its Glossary and Index, because both are filled with other odds and ends that are meant to be entertaining.
Third Edition
One question that I am asked from time to time is whether there will be a third edition. Although the content of the second edition remains largely valid and therefore still useful, a lot has changed since then, to include additional things that I have learned during the past 11 years. So…
We shall see.
🐡
About the Author
Dr Ken Lunde 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, is the author of CJKV Information Processing Second Edition (O’Reilly Media, 2009), and published over 300 articles on Adobe’s now-static CJK Type Blog. Ken earned BA (1987), MA (1988), and PhD (1994) degrees in linguistics from The University of Wisconsin-Madison, served as Adobe’s representative to the Unicode Consortium since 2006, was Adobe’s primary representative from 2015 until 2019, serves as Unicode’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, and became the Chair of the CJK & Unihan Group in 2021. He and his wife, Hitomi, are proud owners of a His & Hers pair of acceleration-boosted 2018 LR AWD Tesla Model 3 EVs.
