Text

The role of text today With the explosion of the Internet (WWW), text has become more important than ever HTML has developed a lot over the years to correspond to needs of multimedia (HTML 1.0 -> HTML 4.01 -> XHTML 1.0 -> XHTML 1.1 -> HTML 5) Academic papers, magazine articles, manuals and even books end up to web Web is a richer medium than the paper pages on a book XHTML 1.1 – Module based XHTML; W3C recommendation was published in May 2001 Do you prefer printed newspapers over web versions? What about magazines?

Text on the web Web is an author’s paradise: millions of potential readers even for a personal web site (people want to share their experiences) For readers web offers millions of pages full of content As technologies have improved (higher bandwidth, more multimedia elements embedded within web documents), design issues are not a common problem anymore Key questions when publishing material online: Who is the audience? What words should I use?

Text in multimedia Probably the most important part of multimedia productions Can be visible such as text on a web site Can be invisible such as a script for a computer game Text (script) is the main content and content is always the king; with no content there is no multimedia production

The power of meaning Every word has many meanings: be careful when choosing words; words in titles, menus and navigation are very important for user experience Go back vs. previous, quit vs. close; what’s the difference? Be careful! Always make sure that typing and spelling errors don’t end up in the final product! Any strange experiences with words in multimedia products?

About fonts and faces A typeface: a family of characters that usually includes many types of sizes and styles A font: a collection of characters of a single size and style belonging to a particular typeface family So usually when you say ”change the font” you mean actually ”change the typeface”

About fonts and faces Typical font styles are bold and italic Type sizes are expressed in points: one point is 0.0138 inches or about 1/72 of an inch The font’s size is the distance from the top of the capital letters to the bottom of the descenders in letters as in y or g Arial, Times and Courier are typefaces; Times 12-point italic is a font In computer world people often speak about fonts when typeface or face would be correct!

Using text in multimedia Menus for navigation: Choose a topic, click on it, get there Buttons for interaction: objects that make things happen when they are clicked Fields for reading: text content Symbols and icons: text in form of stand-alone graphic components; treat them as text because they carry a meaning Animating text: Can be used to retain the a viewer’s attention; don’t overdo special effects or they will become boring Text is a lot harder to read on the screen than in a hard copy: try to present to the user only few paragraphs of text on one page!

Character sets The ASCII character set: The American Standard Code for Information Interchange a 7-bit character coding system commonly used in the USA and abroad Assigns a number or value to 128 characters (both upper- and lowercase + some special symbols) Includes some 32 control characters for device control messages (line feed, tab etc)

Character sets The Extended character set An 8-bit character set Extends the ASCII set by using the extra bit The extra bit is commonly filled with ANSI (American National Standards Institute) characters that include often-used symbols and characters, such as ä or ñ Also known as ISO-Latin-1 character set Used when programming web pages with HTML

Character sets Unicode A solution for handling international language alphabets 16-bit Accommodates up to about 65000 characters Shared symbols of each language are unified into collections of symbols (called scripts) A bit complex system Too complex to explain in this content

Languages The English alphabet: 26 letters The Scandinavian alphabet: 29 letters The kanji alphabet (japanese): more than 3000 kanas (letters, or whole words) All languages, from Navajo to Hebrow, have their own unique alphabets

Font editing and designing tools There are lots of shareware and even freeware font editing programs that can be used together with commercial graphics software A popular Macromedia Fontographer supports almost all platforms Other: TypeStyler, Cool 3D, some plugins for Photoshop (TypeCaster, HotTEXT)