As the IVD Registrar, I am very pleased to announce that a new version of the IVD (Ideographic Variation Database) was released on March 2nd, 2012. It incorporates the results of PRI 183 and PRI 187.

Besides registering additional IVSes (Ideographic Variation Sequences) for the registered Adobe-Japan1 and Hanyo-Denshi IVD collections—32 additional for the former IVD collection, and 8,850 additional for the latter—this version of the IVD introduces a new datafile, IVD_Stats.txt, that provides IVS and VS (Variation Selector) usage statistics, for the entire IVD and on a per-collection basis, and also reports any duplicate sequence identifiers within an IVD collection. This new datafile has also been provided for the two previous versions of the IVD.

For the Adobe-Japan1 IVD collection, the 2012-03-02 version of the IVD represents a particularly important milestone, specifically that the glyphs for all kanji in Adobe-Japan1-6 now have a plain text representation, either via direct encoding or via a registered Adobe-Japan1 IVS.

For developers who IVS-enable their Adobe-Japan1-x OpenType/CFF fonts through the use of the AFDKO makeotf tool, or plan to do so, a new version of the Adobe-Japan1_sequences.txt file is now available, which includes the additional 32 Adobe-Japan1 IVSes. When building IVS-enabled OpenType/CFF fonts, be sure to download and use the latest, and most appropriate, Adobe-Japan1-6 UTF-32 CMap resource, such as UniJIS-UTF32-H or UniJIS2004-UTF32-H, which are made available at the CMap Resources open source project that is hosted at Open @ Adobe.