Are you a software developer, web developer or graphic artist who needs to know how to get typography and fonts to work properly? If you are, then this book is for you. Author Yannis Haralambous, has done an outstanding job of writing a book that shows you how to use fonts and typography on the Web and across a variety of operating systems and application software.
Haralambous, begins with a history of codes and encodings, starting in antiquity. Then, the author presents an introduction to Unicode. Next, he explains the internal workings of encoding. The author also focuses on the following three mechanisms: normalization, the bi-directional algorithm, and the handling of East Asian characters. He continues by addressing a specific problem: how to produce a text encoded in Unicode. Then, the author discusses not the fonts themselves, but their management. Next, he deals with the use of fonts in two specific cases: the TEX typesetting system and Web pages. The author also describes three methods for classifying fonts: Vox, Alessandrini and Panose-1. Finally, he describes the existing tools for creating fonts.
In this most excellent book, the reader is offered a certain number of tools to confront various problems with fonts. Here, the author does not concern himself with all aspects of the electronic document, just those pertaining to characters and glyphs that diirectly and inevitably affect encodings and fonts.