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| History of text |
Since the explosion of the Internet and the World Wide Web,
text has become more important than ever. Indeed, the local language of the Web
is HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), originally designed to display simple text
documents on computer screens, with special graphic images thrown in as
illustrations.
Even a single word may be covered in many meanings, so as
you begin working with text, it is important to develop accuracy and shortness
in the specific words you choose. In multimedia, these are the words that will appear
in your titles, menus, and navigation aids as well as in your description or
content.
Fonts and Faces
A typeface is a
family of graphic characters that usually includes many type sizes and styles.
A font is a collection of characters
of a single size and style belonging to a particular typeface family. Typical font styles are boldface and
italic. Your computer software may add other style attributes, such as underlining
and outlining of characters. Type sizes are usually expressed in points; one point is 0.0138 inch, or about 1/72 of an inch. The font’s size is the distance from the top
of the capital letters to the bottom of the descenders in letters such as g and
y. Helvetica, Times, and Courier are typefaces;
Times 12-point italic is a font. In the computer world, the term font is
commonly used when typeface would be more correct.
A font’s size does not exactly describe the height or width
of its characters.
This is because the x-height (the height of the lowercase letter x) of two
fonts may vary, while the height of the capital letters of those fonts are same
(see Figure ). Computer fonts automatically add space below the descender (and
sometimes above) to provide appropriate line spacing, or leading.
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| The measurement of type |
Character metrics
are the general measurements applied to individual characters; kerning is the spacing between
character pairs. When working with PostScript, TrueType, and Master Fonts—but
not bitmapped fonts—the metrics of a font can be altered to create interesting
effects. For example, you can adjust the body width of each character from
regular to condensed to expanded, as displayed in this example
using the Sabon font:
Or you can adjust the spacing between characters (tracking) and the kerning between pairs
of characters:
When it converts the letter A from a mathematical
representation to a recognizable symbol displayed on the screen or in printed
output by a process called rasterizing,
the computer must know how to represent the letter using tiny square pixels or dots. Now, here is the answer
to How a High-resolution monitors and printers can make more attractive-looking
and varied characters? Because there are finer little squares or dots per inch (dpi) in High-resolution
monitors and printers. The same letter can look very different when you use different fonts and faces:
Cases
In centuries when type was set by hand, the type for a
single font was always stored in two trays, or cases; the upper tray held
capital letters, and the lower tray held the small letters. Today, a capital
letter is called upper-case, and a
small letter is called lowercase.
In some situations, such as for passwords, a computer is case sensitive, meaning that the text’s
upper- and lowercase letters must match exactly to be recognized. But nowadays,
in most situations requiring keyboard input, all computers recognize both the
upper and lowercase forms of a character to be the same. In that manner, the
computer is said to be case insensitive.
When you place an uppercase letter in the middle of a word such
as OptiMist, MuddLex, Pro-Action etc., called an intercap.
Serif and Sans Serif
Serif versus sans serif is the simplest way to categorize a
typeface; the type either has a serif or it doesn’t (sans is French for “without”).
The serif is the little decoration at the end of a letter stroke. Times, New
Century Schoolbook, Bookman, and Palatino are examples of serif fonts.
Helvetica, Verdana, Arial, Optima, and Avant Garde are sans serif. Notice the
difference between serif (on the left) and sans serif:
Anti-Aliasing
Use anti-aliased text where you want a gentle and blended
look for titles and headlines. This can give a more professional appearance. Anti-aliasing blends the colors along
the edges of the letters (called dithering)
to create a soft transition between the letter and its background.
White Space
White space is a designer’s term for roomy blank areas,
while programmers call the invisible character made by a space (ASCII 32) or a tab
(ASCII 9) white space. Web designers use a non breaking space entity
( ) to force spaces into lines of text in HTML documents.
Symbols and Icons
Symbols are concerted
text in the form of stand-alone graphic constructs. Symbols convey meaningful
messages. The trash can symbol, for instance, tells you where to throw away old
files; the hourglass cursor tells you to wait while the computer is processing.
Though you may think of symbols as belonging strictly to the realm of graphic
art, in multimedia you should treat them as text—or visual words—because they
carry meaning. Symbols such as the familiar trash can and hourglass, are more
properly called icons: these are
symbolic representations of objects and processes common to the graphical user
interfaces of many computer operating systems.
Menus for Navigation
An interactive multimedia project or web site typically
consists of a body of information, or content, through which a user navigates
by pressing a key, clicking a mouse, or pressing a touch screen. The simplest
menus consist of text lists of topics. Users choose a topic, click it, and go
there.
Portrait vs. Landscape
The taller-than-wide orientation used for printed documents
is called portrait; this is the 8.5-by-11-inch
size unique to the United States or the internationally designated standard A4
size, 8.27 by 11.69 inches. The wider-than-tall orientation normal to monitors
is called landscape. Shrinking an
11-inch-tall portrait page of text into your avail-able monitor height usually
yields illegible chicken tracks.
Font Wars Are Over
In 1985, the
desktop publishing revolution was spearheaded by Apple and the Macintosh
computer, in combination with word processing and page layout software products
that enabled a high-resolution 300 dpi laser printer using special software to
“draw” the shapes of characters as a cluster of square pixels computed from the
geometry of the character. This special software was the Adobe PostScriptpage
description and outline font language. It was licensed by Apple and included in
the firmware of Apple’s LaserWriter laser printer.
In 1989, Apple
and Microsoft announced a joint effort to develop a “better and faster”
quadratic curves outline font methodology, called TrueType.
Adobe and Microsoft then developed a new and improved font
management system incorporating the best features of both PostScript and TrueType,
and by 2007, OpenType became a free,
publicly available inter-national standard.
The ASCII Character Set
ASCII was invented and standardized for analog teletype
communication early in the age of bits and bytes. The American Standard Code
for Information Interchange (ASCII) is the 7-bit character coding system most
commonly used by computer systems in the United States and abroad. ASCII
assigns a number or value to 128 characters, including lower and uppercase
letters, punctuation marks, Arabic numbers, and math symbols. Also included are
32 control characters used for device control messages, such as carriage
return, line feed, tab, and form feed. ASCII code numbers always represent a
letter or symbol of the English alphabet, so that a computer or printer can
work with the number that represents the letter, regardless of what the letter
might actually look like on the screen or printout. To a computer working with
the ASCII character set, the number 65, for example, always represents an
uppercase letter A. Later, when displayed on a monitor or printed, the number
is turned into the letter.
The Extended Character Set
A byte, which consists of eight bits, is the most commonly
used building block for computer processing. ASCII uses only seven bits to code
its 128 characters; the eighth bit of the byte is unused. This extra bit allows
another 128 characters to be encoded before the byte is used up, and computer systems
today use these extra 128 values for an extended character set. The extended
character set is most commonly filled with ANSI (American National Standards Institute)
standard characters. This fuller set of 255 characters is also known as the
ISO-Latin-1 character set; it is used when programming the text of HTML web
pages.
Unicode
Since 1989, a
concerted effort on the part of linguists, engineers, and information
professionals from many well-known computer companies has been focused on a
16-bit architecture for multilingual text and character encoding. Called
Unicode, the original standard accommodated up to about 65,000 characters to
include the characters from all known languages and alphabets in the world.
Where several languages share a set of symbols that have a
historically related origin, the shared symbols of each language are unified
into collections of symbols (called scripts).
A single script can work for tens or even hundreds of languages