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Words can convey meanings. Choose carefully what words you place in your program. Not everyone will respond the same way to the words you use. Try to pick words and phrases that work across different cultures, and text that will not offend people. Also the grammar that you use such as "Go Back" compared with "Previous". See if people can easily understand what you are saying.

Typeface is a family of is a family of graphic characters that are of various sizes and styles. A font is a particular subset of a typeface. Font sizes are expressed in points. 1 point is about 1/72 of an inch. Original Macs had a display that was truely 72 DPI, and could see true sized text. When printed you got what you saw. Now machines are not of a fixed size and fonts look larger or smaler depending on the monitor's size and resoluton.

Fonts have metrics, that define their size. Page 52 a figure explaining various measurements. Kerning defines the spacing between characters.

Fonts define the mathematical way to display the characters. Once they are defined, the monitor (or printer) must display them using pixels (picture elements, dots). The more pixels (dots) per inch (dpi) the clearer the text will appear.

• Bitmaps

• Bézier curves

Some fonts are proprotional spaced, meaning wide letters like m and w take up more space than i or l. Proportional fonts are easier to read than monospaced fonts. Use monospaced fonts where you need text to line up, such as in a spreadsheet.

Left, proprotional - Right, Mono

Such as in this text, Arial is used on left, while Courier is used on the right.

Serif Typeface - Slanted lines at the tops of letters. Serif is a line or curve extension from the end of a letter.

T

Sans Serif Typeface - No slants. Sans is French for "without".

T

San Serif fonts are designed to be legible in smaller sized fonts. Serifs fonts are good for titles or headlines.

It is easier to read, than to have to listen and pay attention to a lot of audio. Depending on your program, have a blance of space on the screen and text. Too little text, will require many screens, too much text will overwelm them. If you are making a slideshow to a presentation, have a series of bullet points, to allow the audience to focus on the presentor.

• Make sure the fonts you use will be installed on the user's machine. Page 61 lists common fonts. Arial Black, Arial, Verdana, are popular for Macs and PCs.

• Use standard system fonts in your application. Try to stick to a few fonts, but varing the sizes.

• Don't use decorative fonts for small text, it will be difficult to read.

You can have a simple menu or just text on the screen, as a hierarchy showing the various topics to select.

Using images instead of text, elliminates the worry of speical fonts. If you must need special fonts, be sure to include them with your project (assuming you have the right to do so).

If you have a lot of text to be displayed on the screen at one time you have the following options:

• Scrolling text field

• Scrolling screen

• Multiple screens

• Use a special formatted screen. Such as in a stanard page ratio (more taller, than wider).

Symbols & Icons convey means without words.

Adobe PostScript defines a mathematical way of expressing the characters using bezier curves. This helps fonts scale smoothly. Previously fonts had to be defined for each size of the character. Adobe Type Manager (ATM) is a Windows program to help manage the Type 1 PostScript files on your machine.

Microsoft has TrueType fonts which are similar, but are also used to help display text on a monitor.

Anti-Aliasing the edges of text helps remove any "jaggies" of the text.

ASCII text has 7 bits to reprenset 128 characters (including newlines, tabs, etc.)

Exteneded Character Set: ISO-Latin-1 character set is 8 bit, and more characters to include the copyright symbol, and accent marks. The HTML code in web pages typcially uses this standard. You mark up your text with codes.

Unicode is 16 bits and all the characters from all the alphabets in the world.

If you create a program and a user does not have the font installed on their machine that you used, they will end up with a default font. This may look fine, or it may cause your text to be displayed illegible. You can sometimes specify a font substition with your program to help aid the operating system in determining what font to use instead. This is called

Localization: Time/Date, Currency, etc.

Hypermedia has links connecting various elements that allows the user to navigate and interact.

Hypertext Systems contain a lot of linked text or symbolic content.

Hypertext has text that is linked to more information and the text itself becomes the navigational tools.

Search Engines: software robots

Font Software