Fonts & Encodings (Paperback)

~ (Author), P Scott Horne (Translator)
Key Phrases: font reserve, character palette, edit buffer, Multiple Master, East Asian, Enriching Fonts (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product 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.

About the Author

In addition to being a translator, P. Scott Horne is also a typographer, and fluent in the LaTeX system used for the original layout of this book. He translates from multiple languages into English including Chinese, French, Japanese, and Latin. His web site address is http://hornetranslations.com.

Product Details

• Paperback: 1016 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media (September 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596102429
• ISBN-13: 978-0596102425
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.9 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #378,292 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Ultimate Fonts & Encodings Reference, October 26, 2007

By	Daniel McKinnon (Tewksbury, MA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

'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

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars VERY VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!, October 24, 2007

By	John R. Vacca "Tech Write Independent Reviewer" (Pomeroy, Ohio) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lots of original information you can't find on the web, October 7, 2007

By	calvinnme "Texan refugee" (Fredericksburg, Va) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

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