Fonts :
Postscript fonts are a method of describing an image in terms of mathematical constructs (Bezier curves), so it is used not only to describe the individual characters of a font but also to describe illustrations and whole pages of text. Since postscript makes use of mathematical formula, it can be easily scaled bigger or smaller.
Apple and Microsoft announced a joint effort to develop a better and faster quadratic curves outline font methodology, called truetype In addition to printing smooth characters on printers, TrueType would draw characters to a low resolution (72 dpi or 96 dpi) monitor.
Character set and alphabets:
ASCII Character set
The American standard code for information interchange (SCII) is the 7 bit character coding system most commonly used by computer systems in the United states and abroad. ASCII assigns a number of value to 128 characters, including both lower and uppercase letters, punctuation marks, Arabic numbers and math symbols. 32 control characters are also included. These control characters are used for device control messages, such as carriage return, line feed, tab and form feed.
The Extended Character set
A byte which consists of 8 bits, is the most commonly used building block for computer processing. ASCII uses only 7 bits to code is 128 characters; the 8th 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 commonly filled with ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard characters, including frequently used symbols.
Unicode
Unicode makes use of 16-bit architecture for multilingual text and character encoding. Unicode uses about 65,000 characters from all known languages and alphabets in the world. Several languages share a set of symbols that have a historically related derivation, 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.
Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Netscape, IBM, Xerox and Novell are participating in the development of this standard and Microsoft and Apple have incorporated Unicode into their operating system.
Character set and alphabets:
ASCII Character set
The American standard code for information interchange (SCII) is the 7 bit character coding system most commonly used by computer systems in the United states and abroad. ASCII assigns a number of value to 128 characters, including both lower and uppercase letters, punctuation marks, Arabic numbers and math symbols. 32 control characters are also included. These control characters are used for device control messages, such as carriage return, line feed, tab and form feed.
The Extended Character set
A byte which consists of 8 bits, is the most commonly used building block for computer processing. ASCII uses only 7 bits to code is 128 characters; the 8th 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 commonly filled with ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard characters, including frequently used symbols.
Unicode
Unicode makes use of 16-bit architecture for multilingual text and character encoding. Unicode uses about 65,000 characters from all known languages and alphabets in the world. Several languages share a set of symbols that have a historically related derivation, 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.
Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Netscape, IBM, Xerox and Novell are participating in the development of this standard and Microsoft and Apple have incorporated Unicode into their operating system.
