Fonts & Encodings

Fonts & Encodings

by Yannis Haralambous
Released September 2007
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 9780596102425

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Book description

This reference is a fascinating and complete guide to using fonts and typography on the Web and across a variety of operating systems and application software. Fonts & Encodings shows you how to take full advantage of the incredible number of typographic options available, with advanced material that covers everything from designing glyphs to developing software that creates and processes fonts. The era of ASCII characters on green screens is long gone, and industry leaders such as Apple, HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle have adopted the Unicode Worldwide Character Standard. Yet, many software applications and web sites still use a host of standards, including PostScript, TrueType, TeX/Omega, SVG, Fontlab, FontForge, Metafont, Panose, and OpenType. This book explores each option in depth, and provides background behind the processes that comprise today's "digital space for writing":

  • Part I introduces Unicode, with a brief history of codes and encodings including ASCII. Learn about the morass of the data that accompanies each Unicode character, and how Unicode deals with normalization, the bidirectional algorithm, and the handling of East Asian characters.

  • Part II discusses font management, including installation, tools for activation/deactivation, and font choices for three different systems: Windows, the Mac OS, and the X Window System (Unix).

  • Part III deals with the technical use of fonts in two specific cases: the TeX typesetting system (and its successor, W, which the author co-developed) and web pages.

  • Part IV describes methods for classifying fonts: Vox, Alessandrini, and Panose-1, which is used by Windows and the CSS standard. Learn about existing tools for creating (or modifying) fonts, including FontLab and FontForge, and become familiar with OpenType properties and AAT fonts.

Nowhere else will you find the valuable technical information on fonts and typography that software developers, web developers, and graphic artists need to know to get typography and fonts to work properly.

Table of contents

  1. Copyright
  2. Dedication
  4. Introduction
  5. Before Unicode
    1. FIELDATA
    2. ASCII
    3. EBCDIC
    4. ISO 2022
    5. ISO 8859
    6. The Far East
    7. Microsoft's code pages
    8. Apple's encodings
    9. Electronic mail
    10. The Web
  6. Characters, glyphs, bytes: An introduction to Unicode
    1. Philosophical issues: characters and glyphs
    2. Technical issues: characters and bytes
    3. General organization of Unicode: planes and blocks
  7. Properties of Unicode characters
    1. Basic properties
    2. Other general properties
    3. Properties that pertain to case
    4. Rendering properties
    5. Numeric properties
    6. Identifiers
    7. Reading a Unicode block
  8. Normalization, Bidirectionality, and East Asian Characters
    1. Decompositions and Normalizations
    2. The Bidirectional Algorithm
    3. East Asian Scripts
  9. Using Unicode
    1. Interactive Tools for Entering Unicode Characters
    2. Virtual Keyboards
    3. Conversion of Text from One Encoding to Another
  10. 6 Font Management on the Macintosh
    1. The Situation under Mac OS 9
    2. The situation under Mac OS X
    3. Font-Management Tools
    4. Tools for Font Conversion
  11. Font Management under Windows
    1. Tools for Managing Fonts
    2. Tools for Font Conversion
  12. Font Management under X Window
    1. Special Characteristics of X Window
    2. Logical Description of a Font under X
    3. Installing fonts under X
    4. Tools for Managing Fonts under X
    5. Tools for Converting Fonts under X
  13. Fonts under TEX and Ω
    1. Using Fonts in TEX
    2. Installing Fonts for TEX
    3. Customizing TEX Fonts for the User's Needs
    4. Conclusions and Glimpses at the Future
  14. Fonts and Web Pages
    1. (X)HTML, CSS, and Fonts
    2. Tools for Downloading Fonts from the Web
    3. The SVG Format
    4. Conclusion
  15. History and Classifications
    2. The Vox/ATypI Classification of Typefaces
    3. The Alessandrini Classification of Typefaces: Codex 80
    4. IBM's Classification of Fonts
    5. The Panose-1 Classification
  16. Editing and Creating Fonts
    2. FontLab
    3. FontForge
    4. Autotracing
    5. potrace
    6. ScanFont
  17. Optimizing a Rasterization
    1. PostScript Hints
    2. TrueType Instructions
  18. Enriching Fonts: Advanced Typography
    1. Introduction
    2. Managing OpenType Tables in FontLab
    3. Managing OpenType Tables in VOLT
    4. Managing OpenType Tables in FontForge
    5. Managing AAT Tables in FontForge
  19. Bitmap Font Formats
    1. The Macintosh World
    2. The DOS World
    3. The Windows World
    4. The Unix World
    5. The TEX World
    6. Other Less Common Bitmap Formats
    7. Whoever Can Do More Can Also Do Less
  20. TEX and Ω Font Formats
    1. TFM
    2. OFM
    3. VF
    4. OVF
  21. PostScript Font Formats
    1. Introduction to the PostScript Language
    2. Type 3 Fonts
    3. Type 1 Fonts
    4. Multiple Master Fonts
    5. Type 42 Fonts
    6. Type 0, or OCF, Fonts
    7. CID Fonts (Types 9–11, 32)
    8. Type 2/CFF Fonts
  22. The TrueType, OpenType, and AAT Font Formats
    1. TTX: TrueType Fonts Represented in XML
    2. TrueType Collections
    3. General Overview of TrueType Tables
    4. The Kernel of the TrueType Tables
    5. The Tables That Pertain to TrueType-Style Glyph Descriptions
    6. The TrueType Tables That Affect PostScript-Style Glyph Descriptions
    7. Bitmap Management
    8. Some Other Optional Tables
    9. The OpenType Advanced Typographic Tables
    10. Predefined Features, Languages, and Scripts
    11. General AAT Tables
    12. The AAT Tables for Font Variation
    13. AAT Tables with Finite Automata
  23. TrueType Instructions
    1. Basic Concepts
    2. Instructions
    3. Some Examples
  24. METAFONT and Its Derivatives
    1. The METAFONT Programming Language
    2. The Computer Modern Family of Fonts
    3. MetaFog
    4. METATYPE1 and Antykwa Półtawskiego
  25. Bézier Curves
    1. History
    2. Bézier Curves
  26. Bibliography
    1. Bibliography
  27. About the Author
  28. Colophon

Product information

  • Title: Fonts & Encodings
  • Author(s): Yannis Haralambous
  • Release date: September 2007
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9780596102425