2025 “State of the Unification” Report

By Dr Ken Lunde

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.

[embed]2024 “State of the Unification” Report By Dr Ken Lundeken-lunde.medium.com

[embed]2023 “State of the Unification” Report By Dr Ken Lundeken-lunde.medium.com

[embed]2022 “State of the Unification” Report By Dr Ken Lundeken-lunde.medium.com

[embed]2021 “State of the Unification” Report By Dr Ken Lundeken-lunde.medium.com

[embed]2020 “State of the Unification” Report By Dr Ken Lunde, Janitor, Spirits of Christmas Pastken-lunde.medium.com

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:

U+3106C in all seven weights of Source Han Sans / Noto Sans CJK

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](https://www.unicode.org/irg/glyphs.html)*. 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.

[embed]My 28+ Years of #AdobeLife By Dr Ken Lunde, Janitor, Spirits of Christmas Pastken-lunde.medium.com

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.

[embed]The Unicode® CJK & Unihan Group By Dr Ken Lundeken-lunde.medium.com

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:

CJK Unified Ideographs in Unicode Version 18.0 (tentative)

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](https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-han-sans/), [Source Han Serif](https://github.com/adobe-fonts/source-han-serif/), and [Source Han Mono](https://github.com/adobe-fonts/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](https://twitter.com/IVD_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.