Request support for GB18030-2022

[yasuday]

China National Standard body (CESI) has recently published GB18030-2022 which is an updated version of the GB18030 standard and brings GB18030 in sync with Unicode version 11.0. The enforcement date of this updated standard is August 1, 2023.

https://archive.org/details/GB18030-2022/

We request support for the following adding characters in GB18030-2022 in Plex Simplified Chinese, which will be released this year.

• Implementation Level 1 : It requires the 66 ideographs in the ranges 9FA6..9FB3 and 9FBC..9FEF that were not required in the 18030-2005 version.
• Implementation Level 2 : The new version includes 196 Chinese characters that are in the Table of General Standard Chinese Characters but not in GB 18030-2005.Ref: https://ken-lunde.medium.com/the-gb-18030-2022-standard-3d0ebaeb4132
• Implementation Level 3: Implementation Level 3 is described as all additional CJK Unified Ideographs, meaning Extensions B through F in their entirety, along with the 214 characters in the Kangxi Radicals (康熙部首) block.

Ref. List of additional characters in Implementation level 1 and level 2 Characters added in implementation level 1.txt 196.General.Purpose.Hanzi.Set.characters.added.in.implemetation.level.2.txt

[mjabbink]

Passing along to Sandoll

[Marcus98T]

I don't think Plex Sans SC will have GB18030 support because Sandoll already mentioned that Adobe-GB1-0 is the base standard with only Simplified Chinese characters, along with an addition of Tongyong characters.

First of all, we are about to develop Adobe GB1-0 which is the most minimal specification. Also, we are well aware that this specification does not meet the needs of SC users.

So we've been discussing plans to expand SC specs for a long time. Any plans are still up in the air, one of them is to add 《通用规范汉字表》 glyphs that are not included in the specifications.

We will do our best to make fonts that people can use conveniently. Thank you for your continued interest in the IBM Plex CJK project.

Originally posted by @sandoll-inc in https://github.com/IBM/plex/issues/334#issuecomment-913340971

Developing this font is already taking a very long time, so it will be quite a long wait to get basic Simplified Chinese support, let alone GB18030 support (Level 2 at least) with about 28K hanzi, when probably about 10K hanzi (which is GB 2312, Tongyong and probably some other GB simplified character lists) is good enough for 99% of Simplified Chinese usage.

Not to mention a separate Traditional Chinese version is also in development, and Sandoll has other non-open source projects to work on as well.