BabelStone Fonts : BabelStone Han PUA

Description

BabelStone Han PUA v. 1.387 includes 5,116 unencoded CJK ideographs and ideographic components in the PUA, in the range U+E080 through U+F8DF. All characters except those marked with a star are also present at the same code points in BabelStone Han version 15.1.2. This font is updated frequently (usually whenever I add new characters), whereas the main BabelStone Han font is only updated occasionally.

In principle, I do not include unifiable glyph variants of encoded characters in this font. My BabelStone Han font includes a large number of glyph variants as an experimental set of ideographic variation sequences, as documented in BabelStone Han Variation Sequences. These include some glyph forms that were previously included in the BabelStone Han PUA font.

Many of the characters listed below have already been submitted to the Ideographic Research Group (IRG) for encoding in the ISO/IEC 10646 and Unicode standards, but the process of encoding CJK ideographs is long and convoluted, and it may take five years or longer from proposal submission up until the time that a character is available in Unicode. The current encoding status of each character is provided in the final column of the table below. When a new version of the Unicode Standard adds any of the characters listed on this page, they are removed from the font, and the code points may later be allocated for other unencoded characters. My aim is to have as few characters as possible in this font, as hopefully most of the will eventually be encoded. However, at present the rate of additions to the font exceeds the rate of encoding of characters in the font.

Characters are removed from this font (and from the PUA of BabelStone Han) when they are encoded or if they are identified with an already encoded character (see Version History near the end of this page for details, which links to archives of key versions of the font). The code points of removed characters may then be reused for different characters. Therefore the code points in BabelStone Han PUA are not stable, and if recording the code point of a character in BabelStone Han PUA on another website or in a database the version of the font should be recorded with the code point.

If you want me to add any unencoded characters to this font for your use, please let me know (email), and I will usually be happy to consider adding them for free if there are only a few of them. NB I will not normally add simple glyph variants of existing encoded characters to this font.

PUA Characters in BabelStone Han PUA

• The table below renders the PUA character using "BabelStone Han PUA" either installed on your system or as a dynamically downloaded web font (WOFF). If you have an old version of "BabelStone Han PUA" installed on your system then characters added in the latest version will not be displayed correctly.
• The 682 characters with a star by the code point are not available in the latest version of the BabelStone Han font.
• A plain text file listing all IDS sequences for the current version of the font is available as IDS_PUA.TXT (v. 1.320).