Nisus Writer Express - Manual (Page 281)

Appendices
Appendix I
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
<[email protected]>
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.
font or typeface
According to the Wikipedia <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font>, “a typeface is a
coordinated set of glyphs designed with stylistic unity. A typeface usually
comprises an alphabet of letters, numerals, and punctuation marks; it may also
include ideograms and symbols, or consist entirely of them, for example,
mathematical or map-making symbols. The term typeface is often conflated with
font, a term which, historically, had a number of distinct meanings before the
advent of desktop publishing; these terms are now effectively synonymous when
discussing digital typography. A helpful and still valid distinction between font
and typeface is a font's status as a discrete commodity with legal restrictions,
while typeface designates a visual appearance or style not immediately reducible
to any one foundry's production or proprietary control.”
glyph
The shape of the basic unit in any written language. These include letters,
numerals, punctuation marks, as well as Chinese and Japanese characters.
grapheme
The basic unit in any written language