A little over one week ago, the Japan NB (National Body) submitted to The Unicode Consortium their first IVD Collection for registration, which is being referred to as PRI 167 (Public Review Issue #167), but its actual name is the “Hanyo-Denshi” (汎用電子) IVD Collection. I was very pleased to see this, because it represents the second such submission.

The first IVD Collection to be successfully registered, of course, was the “Adobe-Japan1” IVD Collection, which was declared final on December 14, 2007. We have thus far IVS-enabled fifty of our OpenType Japanese fonts based on these registered IVSes. Since then, the two major OSes, specifically Mac OS X (from Version 10.6) and Windows 7, have become IVS-enabled. Adobe Acrobat (from Version 9.0), Adobe Flash Player (from Version 10), and Adobe InDesign (from CS4) were the first products to become IVS-enabled.

My initial examination of PRI 167 found that there are 4,214 glyphs included, 1,924 of which represent standard or default forms. This meant 2,290 variant forms. Of these 2,290 variant forms, I found that 633 could map to Adobe-Japan1-6 CIDs, meaning to “Adobe-Japan1” IVSes, though 28 could be argued either way due to subtle glyph differences.

I submitted my first round of PRI 167 comments to the submitter on April 8, 2010, which included a mapping table for the 2,557 (1,924 + 633) glyphs that can map between the IVD Collections. I plan to finish a second round of comments by the end of this month.

Because IVD Collection submissions require a ninety-day public review, I encourage others who are qualified to review its contents to do so.