Nisus Writer Express - Manual (Page 283)

Appendices 263
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 Express reads in the
file (which can contain only numbers, remember), it first has to figure out what
encoding you used so Nisus Writer Express can match it to the right letter.
Nisus Writer Classic format decided what encoding to use based on the font you
applied. If your font is not available in the new System, Nisus Writer Express tries
to guess. Sometimes it works, a lot of times it doesn’t. On OS X, fonts sometimes
don’t show up or work as they did in OS 9. This is the primary reason people see
garbage text when they try to open Classic files.
Unicode, on the other hand is much better. The number 65 always means capital
“A” for example no matter what. So your text is better preserved, and its is far
simpler for Nisus Writer Express to deal with multilingual text.
UTF-16
A “Unicode Transformation Format” that uses 16 bits to hold the information
about the characters in your document.
UTF-8
A “Unicode Transformation Format” that uses 8 bits to hold the information about
the characters in your document.
WYSIWYG
What You See Is What You Get
Used to describe something where the content during editing appears very similar
to the final product.