BTC640/Text

Lecture

Some forms of information are best delivered using text. Describing a view in text may be problematic to replace an online image gallery but trying to draw the latest news or a technical specification is also very challenging.

The reality is that to present material well means using a combination of technologies and text should not be discouted as old or obsolete - it is still very useful, important, and quite complex (lots to learn).

Definitions: glyphs, fonts, styles, rasterizing, serif, sans serif, anti-aliasing.

Font availability

Almost every single computer has a different set of fonts available. A different set of fonts comes with every different version of the operating system, can be installed by applications, and installed by the user.

For example text in a rich text file may look very different on your computer at home than the same file on a school computer. It will almost certainly look different on a different OS (Linux, OSX).

If the desired font is not available, applications have rules for choosing the closest font that is available.

PDF is one of the very few text formats where the file includes the fonts so that it looks identical on all platforms.

Text can be rasterised before distribution (turned into a bitmap), which will ensure that text looks the same on all platforms, but a bitmap of a text is usually not a good option excapt for titles and perhaps buttons.

Languages

English is the primary language of computers, but it's far from beeing the only one that matters. Operting systems (Windows, OSX, Linux) and most software ships in many different languages and many non-english-speaking users never have the need to learn english to use a computer or the internet effectively.

To make use of different languages we separate the representation of the information (e.g. "Create" and "Créer") from the information itself (this is text that will be shown to the user and they will be able to click on it to create a page). Then a list of strings can be extracted from the software or website and translated into different languages without programming knowledge. Because the mapping of meaning to representation is static (only the language of the representation changes) the table can be easily dropped back into the software which is now available in an extra language.

Technologies that can be used to this end:

• PO file editors (e.g. http://www.littlesvr.ca/isomaster/community/)
• String resources in Android (http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/localization.html)
• Satelite assemblies in Windows (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y99d1cd3%28v=VS.80%29.aspx)
• Many others