Nisus Writer Express - Manual (Page 282)

262 Appendix I - Glossary of Useful Terms
gremlin
Loosely “gremlins” are any non-printing characters that serve no useful purpose.
Currently Nisus Writer Express defines the following code points as gremlins:
U+0000 to U+0008 ASCII Null to Backspace
U+000B Vertical Tab
U+0014 to U+0017 ASCII Shift Out to Unit Separator
U+0082 to U+0083 ASCII Break Permitted and Negation
U+0086 to U+009F ASCII Start Of Selected Area to Application Program Command
U+E000 to U+F700 Private use area, which is technically from E000–F8FF
Apple has assignments starting at F700
GREP
GREP is an acronym which means “search globally for lines matching the regular
expression, and print them”. The important part here is “regular expression”.
Using GREP you can search for “text patterns” (regular expressions: series of
numbers, or series of letters, etc.). Nisus Writer Express uses a variant of GREP
and makes it available to its users in a menu-driven from that use human
language and visual cues.
ideogram/ideograph
A graphic symbol like an icon on your Macintosh Desktop, or the buttons you
click in the Nisus Writer Express 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 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.
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 graphics 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