Nisus Writer Pro - Manual (Page 483)

Appendices 463
gzip A widely supported compression/archive format.
The new "Nisus Compressed Rich Text" format (file extension “zrtf”) is a way to
reduce the size of files that NWP saves. It’s basically the normal Nisus Writer Pro
RTF, zipped, and saved to disk. No other application will understands this, but it
reduces file sizes by a large amount. However, in a pinch a user can rename a file
from "whatever.zrtf" to "whatever.rtf.zip" and let the Finder expand it into a normal
RTF file
ideogram/ideograph
A graphic symbol like an icon on your Macintosh Desktop, or the buttons you
click in the Nisus Writer Pro interface. These represent an idea, rather than a
group of letters arranged according sounds they might represent in a spoken
language. Some writing systems (notably those of East Asia (and the Hieroglyphics
of ancient Egypt)) are considered “ideographic” even though many of the symbols
in these systems represent words or small bits of meaning, rather than complete
ideas.
kerning The process of adjusting spacing letter pairs in a proportional font (see also
ligature and tracking).
leading During the period of moveable type, small strips of lead were placed between the
lines of text in order to increase the space and readability. This artifact gave its
name to what is now often referred to as “line spacing”. Leading (which refers to
vertical spacing) should not be confused with tracking, which refers to the
horizontal spacing between letters or characters.
ligature A complex glyph created when multiple letter-forms join into one, usually
replacing two sequential characters that a common component such as the
ascender of an f becoming the dot of the i that follows it: fi = fi. Not all fonts
support ligatures (see also kerning and tracking).
metacharacter Any character that has a meaning other than its literal meaning; in particular for
work with GREP.
orphans and widows
The easiest way to remember the difference between and an orphan and a widow
is to remember that orphans are “left behind” and widows are forced to “go on
ahead by themselves” just as an orphan or widow in life. Orphans are separated
segments of text at the beginning of a paragraph or sentence while widows are
separated segments of text at the end of a paragraph or sentence.
pathname See “file path”.
text attributes During the days of the Classic Macintosh OS, almost all applications had a Style
menu. The commands of this menu applied attributes to the text. Beginning with
OS X, the standard for applications is to have a Format menu through which a
wide variety of attributes can be applied to the text. These include things that
would have been considered “styles” applied to individual characters as well as
controls that affect the shapes of paragraphs as well.
text encoding At its core, the computer recognizes only ones and zeros. In order to display all of
them as text and images in your document and store them appropriately on your
hard drive, as well as send them to others so that they can read what you have
created, the computer needs to “convert” those digits back and forth between long
strings of ones and zeros… and more humanly-recognizable symbols. A variety of
ways of converting your text exist. These are called Text Encoding methods.
Among these are ASCII and Unicode.
tracking Also known as letter spacing, or character spacing, tracking refers to the space
between all the letters of a word (see also kerning and ligature).
Unicode All computers know only about numbers. To store letters, you have to assign them
numbers. 1=A, 2=B, and so on. In the old days, you could use different
“encodings” that assigned different numbers to different letters depending on the
language you were working in, etc. One example of this is ASCII.
Unicode is an encoding just like ASCII, Latin ISO-1, etc. However, it assigns a
number to virtually every letter (and diacritic) for nearly every alphabet on the
planet past or present.
This is really useful especially when mixing characters from lots of different
languages. In Nisus Writer Classic, the only way to store letters from different
alphabets is to use different encodings. When Nisus Writer Pro reads in the file
(which can contain only numbers, remember), it first has to figure out what
encoding you used so Nisus Writer Pro can match it to the right letter.