1. Essential Skills for Computing Fonts
André Schappo

2. To gain some understanding:
Aims
To gain some understanding:
Fonts
The extensive range of characters available
Unicode
At the end of this lecture students should be able to:
Create a simple multi-language web page
Essential Skills for Computing

3. What is this ? 好
Essential Skills for Computing

4. Terminology depends on context/discipline
Could be described as:
picture
drawing
chinese
japanese
script
letter
character
glyph
symbol
Terminology depends on context/discipline
Essential Skills for Computing

5. Computer Font
A (Computer) Font:
is a collection/grouping of characters (Character Set)
its characters are (often) related
each character has an associated glyph
Essential Skills for Computing

6. A (Computer) Font character:
is more a concept than an actuality
a character has a consensus agreed label/function/meaning
a character can be in many fonts
“Exclamation Mark” is a character
“Exclamation Mark” is a punctuation character
Essential Skills for Computing

7. Glyphs
Glyphs:
a glyph is the visual representation/ manifestation of a character
the “!” is the glyph for the “Exclamation Mark” character
The glyphs of a font have a style (as designed by Font Author)
Additional transformation (styling) can be applied by using applications (eg GIMP)
Essential Skills for Computing

8. Otherwise it is “Look and See”
Font Naming
The character set and/or style is (sometimes) indicated by the font name eg
Apple Braille
Apple Symbol
Hiragino Kaku Gothic Pro (ヒラギノ角ゴ)
Edwardian Script ITC
Otherwise it is “Look and See”
⾒ Use “Font Book” in Mac OSX to look at these fonts ⾒
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9. One Character, Many Fonts
The character 好 is in fonts
GungSeo
Apple LiGothic
Hiragino Kaku
Osaka
Arial Unicode MS
.... and more .....
⾒ Use “Character Palette” in MacOSX to see which fonts contain a character and to see the different styles. ⾒
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10. There are many fonts Problem
each with its own character set and glyphs
What coverage of characters does a computer have?
It will certainly not be complete
Problem
Automatic Font Substitution ie which font to choose for a character
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11. A font implementation of a “Universal Character Set”
The Ideal
A “Universal Character Set” that encompasses all characters, including:
all natural languages
all symbols
Braille
International Phonetics Alphabet (IPA)
...etc...
A font implementation of a “Universal Character Set”
Essential Skills for Computing

12. Available Character Sets
There are many Character Sets, each with different character coverage
⾒ ISO ⾒ (Western European)
⾒ ISO-2022-JP ⾒ (Japanese)
⾒ GB2312 ⾒ (Simplified Chinese)
...etc...
There are mappings between each Character Set and the font characters
Essential Skills for Computing

13. Unicode is a character set that has extensive coverage, including:
Basic Latin
Hebrew
Tibetan
Mathematical Operators
Geometric Shapes
Hiragana
Unihan (hanzi, hanja, kanji)
Musical Symbols
Braille
and much much more
Essential Skills for Computing

14. ⾒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode ⾒ ⾒ http://www.unicode.org/ ⾒
Unicode Info
⾒ Use “Character Palette” in MacOSX to see the Unicode character coverage ⾒
⾒ ⾒
⾒ ⾒
Essential Skills for Computing

15. Currently there is NO font that contains all the Unicode characters.
Unicode Fonts
Currently there is NO font that contains all the Unicode characters.
Each font contains a subset of Unicode
There are two fonts (that I know of) that contain a major part of Unicode.
Arial Unicode MS ⾒ ⾒
Code2000 ⾒ ⾒
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16. The Unicode Codepoint for 好 is U+597D
Unicode Encodings
The Unicode Codepoint for 好 is U+597D
Different systems use different encodings for 好. Encodings include
Unicode UTF-8: E5A5BD (Hexadecimal)
Unicode UTF-16: 597D (Hexadecimal)
HTML entity: &#22909
⾒ Use UnicodeChecker to see character encodings ⾒
Essential Skills for Computing

17. This means that, such an application/system is multi-language capable
UTF-8
A UTF-8 capable application/system can display/manipulate/transmit any character from the Unicode character set.
This means that, such an application/system is multi-language capable
Unicode UTF-8 is becoming a standard.
Essential Skills for Computing

18. Email Systems generally allow for choice of Character Set when sending
LU web mail is such a system
Generally one should set the default as UTF-8
What happens when an incorrect Character Set is chosen?
⾒ I will demonstrate ⾒
Essential Skills for Computing

19. Web Pages - Character Sets
⾒ ⾒ uses ISO
⾒ ⾒ uses ISO-2022-JP
⾒ UTF-8 Test Page ⾒ uses UTF-8
1 & 2 have constrained character sets
3 can use the full Unicode character set
Use Unicode UTF-8
Essential Skills for Computing

20. Web Safe Fonts ⾒ web safe fonts ⾒
Use fonts that the client machine is likely to have
Use Generic Font Families, such as:
sans serif
cursive
serif
Arial Unicode MS is a good candidate for a “Web Safe Font”
⾒ web safe fonts ⾒
Essential Skills for Computing

21. Glyph Safe Machine
Glyph Safe Machine
Ensure a comprehensive set of fonts that gives complete character coverage
Then you will no longer see ▯▯▯▯▯▯ or ��� in your browser/ /word processor ...etc...
Essential Skills for Computing

22. Multi-language/symbol Webpages
Setting up a Unicode Webpage
Save page as Unicode UTF-8 encoding
In the header of your html page include the statement:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
You will now be able to put any Unicode Characters into your html page
Whether or not they display correctly is dependent on the client machine.
Essential Skills for Computing

23. The End
There are font exercises for you to complete. These exercises will address the issues of
Character Sets
Client Machine Setup
Essential Skills for Computing