Customer Reviews

Fonts & Encodings

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

'Fonts & Encodings' by Yannis Haralambous is about as complete a book as you will find on any computer topic, bar none. Rarely are expectations exceeded when it comes to anything in life, but this book goes way way way beyond what any other fonts/encodings book has done in the past. Packing 1000+ pages of content into this text, the author discusses all the relevant topics as hand, from history to font creation and specification to math involved in creating these typefaces we use every day... truly to infinity and beyond!!!

If you are a developer or user of fonts and want to learn more about the history of how difficult and non-trivial even the most basic characters were to get on your browser window, this book is for you. If you need this pertinent information and are in the business of creating fonts yourself, this book is for you. If you are just interested in the topic of one of the most basic computer technologies, this book is (you guessed it) for you!!!

With 14 chapters and 6 appendices, this book truly puts the U in Unicode and is a must read for anyone that wants to learn more about this exciting topic!!

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Are you a software developer, web developer or graphic artist who needs to know how to get typography and fonts to work properly? If you are, then this book is for you. Author Yannis Haralambous, has done an outstanding job of writing a book that shows you how to use fonts and typography on the Web and across a variety of operating systems and application software.

Haralambous, begins with a history of codes and encodings, starting in antiquity. Then, the author presents an introduction to Unicode. Next, he explains the internal workings of encoding. The author also focuses on the following three mechanisms: normalization, the bi-directional algorithm, and the handling of East Asian characters. He continues by addressing a specific problem: how to produce a text encoded in Unicode. Then, the author discusses not the fonts themselves, but their management. Next, he deals with the use of fonts in two specific cases: the TEX typesetting system and Web pages. The author also describes three methods for classifying fonts: Vox, Alessandrini and Panose-1. Finally, he describes the existing tools for creating fonts.

In this most excellent book, the reader is offered a certain number of tools to confront various problems with fonts. Here, the author does not concern himself with all aspects of the electronic document, just those pertaining to characters and glyphs that diirectly and inevitably affect encodings and fonts.

This is a terrific book for the technically minded person either designing type or dealing with its use from a technology perspective. I read the English translation and found the writing good and informative. My problem is that there appear to be numerous typos particularly in the hundreds of code examples. This may only be in the translation since I have not seen the original French. I hope the publisher can give it a thorough proof reading!

This is a different kind of book from O'Reilly on the subject of fonts and their encoding. At first glance you'd think that this book is much like an old book on graphics formats published by O'Reilly eleven or so years ago. That book was useful until all of the formats became outmoded and just looking up the information on the web seemed like a much more efficient idea than lugging around the 1500 page tome that the second edition became. However, this book is in a different category from that one entirely. Besides dealing with fonts from the perspective of history and typesetting, the author talks about algorithms and writing software that can create and process fonts with plenty of concrete examples and illustrations. I've been working with image processing for a long time, and I've already found plenty of information on how to add some font-handling capabilities to my program that I couldn't find elsewhere. Plus this book has a very good tutorial on Unicode and where it came from. Highly recommended. The following is the table of contents:

1. Before Unicode 27
2. Characters, glyphs, bytes: An introduction to Unicode 53
3. Properties of Unicode characters 95
4. Normalization, bidirectionality, and East Asian characters 127
5. Using unicode 159
6. Font management on the Macintosh 187
7. Font management under Windows 209
8. Font management under X Windows 221
9. Fonts in TEX, their installation and use 235
10. Fonts and web pages 315
11. History and Classification of Latin Typefaces 367
12. Editing and Creating Fonts 442
13. Optimizing a rasterization 505
14. Enriching Fonts: Advanced Typography 549
Appendix A. Bitmap Font Formats 599
Appendix B. TEX Font Formats 623
Appendix C. Postscript Font Formats 635
Appendix D. The Truetype, OpenType, and AAT Font Formats 705
Appendix E. TrueType Instructions 879
Appendix F. METAFONT and its Derivatives 905
Appendix G. Bezier Curves 961

I ordered this book to help me with character encodings in our digital library files. That is fully covered, but there is so much more. Chapter 11 - History of Latin Fonts - is worth the price of the book. It makes sense that this book would be written by a European because of the great number of languages in Europe. I am very thankful that it was translated from French to English so I could have access!

'Fonts & Encodings' by Yannis Haralambous is one of the most complete books I've ever read on a single topic. But surprisingly and opossite to most computer-related books, this one is perhaps the most easy to understand.

This is not a book just for the web developer or the typesetter. Nor it is for the graphic designer or for the software programmer. This is also a book for everyone interested in how computers work, in how data is converted into a graphical interpretation readable by humans.

Being a graphic designer and publisher for 30 years and a web designer and programmer for the last 10, I really enjoyed the history section, which transported me to those days when personal computers did not even exist and typography had to be hand-made as well as its continuous evolution to get the state as we know it now: Fonts & Encodings.

The way this book is structured make the novice readers find the subject of interest without having to go into the complicated technical stuff, while making the techs and versed find and easily understand the most complicated issues regarding the topic.

Special credits to P. Scott Horne for a so brilliant translation. Those who speak several languages will agree with me on how difficult is to translate a book mostly technical without getting lost in translation.

Daniel Ajzen "WEBstationONE" (San Diego, CA, USA)

I've read and reread this book a number of times. It is now dogged eared, book marked, and tagged more than any other book in my library. It contains great anecdotal stories, unmatched technical information, and is clearly a work of true devotion. If you are a designer, typographer, or IT support for font intensive workflows, this book is required reading for mastery of the subject. Run to get this book. Another glowing example of the quality books released by O'Reilly.

I doubt I will ever read this book cover to cover. However, I am sure I will look things up in it on many occasions. And, there are a number of introductory sections I plan to read immediately.

It's a good book, it's a thick book.

But it does not deserve 5 stars. Three main problems:

1) it is too thick and often goes in far too many details

2) some of the material is out-of-date: for instance how to create keyboard drivers under Mac OS.

3) It is not didactic, Yannis obviously wants to impress his colleagues and his readers, not necessarily be understood by the below-average geek like me. Where is a simple introduction to OpenType before going in all the gory details?

This being said the book is interesting and some chapters are fascinating.

On page 29 the author claims that ASCII was adopted "a few months after the assasination of President Kennedy" on June 17, 1963. I don't why the author would make such a careless and impertinant reference but it calls to question the proof readers at O'Reilly and the quality of the research that forms the basis for buying this book. Can I trust the information on Unicode if they can't bother to look up their facts? How many other things did they just make up and put in print?
The reader is repeatedly referred to as "her" as a sop to political correctness. This is a computer book and not the editorial page. These girls should have married a doctor.