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by: Yannis Haralambous
List Price: $59.99Amazon.com's Price: $51.04 You Save: $8.95 (15%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 686.22544
EAN: 9780596102425
Format: Illustrated
ISBN: 0596102429
Label: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 1037
Publication Date: September 26, 2007
Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Sales Rank: 590834
Studio: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
This reference is a fascinating and complete guide to using fonts and typography on the Web and across a variety of operating systems and application software. Fonts & Encodings shows you how to take full advantage of the incredible number of typographic options available, with advanced material that covers everything from designing glyphs to developing software that creates and processes fonts.
The era of ASCII characters on green screens is long gone, and industry leaders such as Apple, HP, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle have adopted the Unicode Worldwide Character Standard. Yet, many software applications and web sites still use a host of standards, including PostScript, TrueType, TeX/Omega, SVG, Fontlab, FontForge, Metafont, Panose, and OpenType. This book explores each option in depth, and provides background behind the processes that comprise today's 'digital space for writing': - Part I introduces Unicode, with a brief history of codes and encodings including ASCII. Learn about the morass of the data that accompanies each Unicode character, and how Unicode deals with normalization, the bidirectional algorithm, and the handling of East Asian characters.
- Part II discusses font management, including installation, tools for activation/deactivation, and font choices for three different systems: Windows, the Mac OS, and the X Window System (Unix).
- Part III deals with the technical use of fonts in two specific cases: the TeX typesetting system (and its successor, W, which the author co-developed) and web pages.
- Part IV describes methods for classifying fonts: Vox, Alessandrini, and Panose-1, which is used by Windows and the CSS standard. Learn about existing tools for creating (or modifying) fonts, including FontLab and FontForge, and become familiar with OpenType properties and AAT fonts.
Nowhere else will you find the valuable technical information on fonts and typography that software developers, web developers, and graphic artists need to know to get typography and fonts to work properly.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Thick book, sometimes already outdated, not didactic
It's a good book, it's a thick book.
But it does not deserve 5 stars. Three main problems:
1) it is too thick and often goes in far too many details
2) some of the material is out-of-date: for instance how to create keyboard drivers under Mac OS.
3) It is not didactic, Yannis obviously wants to impress his colleagues and his readers, not necessarily be understood by the below-average geek like me. Where is a simple introduction to OpenType before ... Read More
Rating:  - Great book lots of errors though
This is a terrific book for the technically minded person either designing type or dealing with its use from a technology perspective. I read the English translation and found the writing good and informative. My problem is that there appear to be numerous typos particularly in the hundreds of code examples. This may only be in the translation since I have not seen the original French. I hope the publisher can give it a thorough proof reading!
Rating:  - Nothing short of a masterpiece.
I ordered this book to help me with character encodings in our digital library files. That is fully covered, but there is so much more. Chapter 11 - History of Latin Fonts - is worth the price of the book. It makes sense that this book would be written by a European because of the great number of languages in Europe. I am very thankful that it was translated from French to English so I could have access!
Rating: - What a Wonderful book!!
'Fonts & Encodings' by Yannis Haralambous is one of the most complete books I've ever read on a single topic. But surprisingly and opossite to most computer-related books, this one is perhaps the most easy to understand.
This is not a book just for the web developer or the typesetter. Nor it is for the graphic designer or for the software programmer. This is also a book for everyone interested in how computers work, in how data is converted into a graphical interpretation readable ... Read More
Rating: - The Ultimate Fonts & Encodings Reference
'Fonts & Encodings' by Yannis Haralambous is about as complete a book as you will find on any computer topic, bar none. Rarely are expectations exceeded when it comes to anything in life, but this book goes way way way beyond what any other fonts/encodings book has done in the past. Packing 1000+ pages of content into this text, the author discusses all the relevant topics as hand, from history to font creation and specification to math involved in creating these typefaces we use every day... ... Read More
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