Hi Folks,
I figure the people on this list can truly appreciate this:
Homo Sapiens is a species that writes. And among the large number of tools used
for writing, the most recent and the most complex is the computer -- a tool for
reading and writing, a medium for storage, and a means of exchanging data, all
rolled into one. It is a veritable "space" in which the text resides, a space
that, as MacLuhan and others correctly predicted, has come to transcend
geographic boundaries and encompass the entire planet.
Within this digital space for writing, fonts and encodings serve fundamentally
different needs. They form an inseparable duo, like yin and yang, Heaven and
Earth, theory and practice. An encoding emerges from the tendency to
conceptualize information; it is the result of an abstraction, a construction
of the mind. A font is a means of visually representing writing, the result of
a concrete expression, a graphical construct.
An encoding is a table of "characters" -- a character being an abstract,
intangible entity. A font is a container for "glyphs," which are images,
drawings, physical marks of blank ink on a white background. When the reader
enters the digital space for writing, he participates in the unending ballet
between characters and glyphs: the keys on the keyboard are marked with glyphs;
when a key is pressed, a character is transmitted to the system, which, unless
the user is entering a password, in turn displays glyphs on the screen. To send
an email message is to send characters, but these are displayed to the
recipient in the form of glyphs. When we run a search on a text file, we search
for a string of characters, but the results are shown to us as a sequence of
glyphs. And so on.
So there is a perpetual metamorphosis between characters and glyphs.
From the book "Fonts & Encodings" by Yannis
Haralambous
