Genuine Han Unification—Redux
By Dr Ken Lunde
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.
