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= Lecture =
Textbook chapter: 2
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, true type fonts (TTF), PostScript. Font attributes: point size, weight, slope, width.
== Font availability ==
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.
Consider also that on different platforms it may be ''desirable'' to have the text look different, for example to match a default system font.
== Setting font properties ==
On the web text can be associated with a font (and decorations) in several different ways:
* Hard-coded tags such as <b>, <i>, <font>. This is not a good idea unless the website look will never change. Hand-editing formatting everywhere it is used is very time consuming (i.e. expensive).
* HTML tags that describe the type of the text rather than how it looks, such as <h1>, <p>, <blockquote>. This is the best choice for simple websites, the look will be decided by the browser and can be modified using CSS.
* CSS classes and attributes. This is the most common ways to associate text with how it looks. If a change is needed - only the CSS file needs to be modified, no searching for <font> and <b> tags in the body. CSS also allows modification of colour, spacing, and other interesting properties. See p.30 in the textbook for some examples.
Font styles are used not only on the web but in regular applications such as office suites. For example you can set what the Heading 1 type looks like in your document, and later change how all the top-level headers look by modifying that style.
If you're writing a book (to be printed), you will most likely use LaTeX for the markup. Here too the formatting details are usually definted separately from the text they apply to.
== Languages ==
* Satelite assemblies in Windows (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y99d1cd3%28v=VS.80%29.aspx)
* Many others
The whole process is called localization or internationalizaion (l10n, i18n). The exact definition of the terms is slightly more complicated than that but we don't need to go into it.
The representation of a character in memory is different depending on the software that's beeing used. The common options are ascii and Unicode (UTF8, UTF16/UCS2, UTF32/UCS4).
Fonts for non-latin character sets may not be available on a target system but these days the support is pretty good across the board.
== Other ==
Menus, buttons, fields, dynamic layout in applications
== Degree Students ==
Not entirely related to text is the concept of 'chunking'. People are capable of remembering
= Lab =
