Appendix ii, Glossary of useful terms, Ge 461 – Nisus Writer Pro User Manual
Page 481: See appendix ii
Appendix II
Glossary of Useful Terms
This document uses a number of terms that either may not be familiar to the “casual” user or are
used in a technical way unique to word processing. We offer a small glossary of terms here . If you
encounter other words that you believe should be included, please send them to
>
ASCII
“American Standard Code for Information Interchange”
ASCII was used for many years to represent all the alpha-numeric, punctuation,
and similar characters you stored on your computer. ASCII could only display the
standard Roman character set, so, over the years various “kludges” developed,
among them Apple’s WorldScript technology which used the upper range (from
128-255) to display non-Roman characters. Nisus Writer Classic worked
seamlessly with this system. However, problems remained when users tried to
exchange documents with more than one script system in them.
In 1986, only two years after the Macintosh was released, engineers at Xerox
started working to create a single font that would display the identical characters
shared by Japanese and Chinese. This lead to early discussions of “Han
Unification”. Simultaneously, based on issues related to Apple File Exchange,
engineers at Apple began looking into the possibility of a “universal character set”.
These efforts, and others, lead to the development of the Unicode Consortium.
According to the Unicode Consortium
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the
platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.
The first 127 codes for Unicode are the same as ASCII.
baseline
In some writing systems (such as Devanagari and formal Hebrew), the letters seem
to hang from an imaginary line, however, in Roman based scripts the letters rest
on, or descend below an imaginary line called a baseline.
Boolean
Named for George Boole, who developed a general method of symbolic reasoning
that lead to the idea that “on/off” (“true/false”, “yes/no”, “1 or 0” circuits with
relays could solve certain algebraic problems. This is the concept that supports
the possibility of digital computers.
dingbat
An ornament used in typesetting, sometimes called a "printer's ornament". Often
used to describe fonts with symbols and shapes in positions ordinarily held by
alphabetical or numeric characters. The Unicode dingbat plane is: U+2700–U
+27BF.
file path
According to the Wikipedia <>, “A
path is the general form of a file or directory name, giving a file’s name and its
unique location in a file system. Paths point to their location using a string of
characters signifying directories, each path component separated by a delimiting
character, most commonly the slash “/” or backslash character “\”, or colon “:”
though some operating systems may use a different delimiter. Paths are used
extensively in computer science to represent the directory/file relationships
common in modern operating systems, and are essential in the construction of
Uniform Resource Locators (URLs).”
was trained as a lawyer in his native Vienna. He came to the United
States in 1938 where he received his Ph.D. at Columbia University. Among his
numerous books are The Art of Plain Talk, Say What You Mean, The Art of Clear
Thinking, and The Art of Readable Writing (published by Harper and Row). This
explanation of how to determine the reading ease of a text was culled from The Art
of Readable Writing. There are two aspects to readability: ease of reading and
interest. The first is determined by the structure of words and sentences; the use
of “personal words” or “personal sentences” constitutes the other. The Flesch
reading ease score found in the window that appears when you choose the menu
command File > Text Analysis… represents the first of these and is determined