TEXT DATA

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•Text is a vital element of multimedia presentations.
•Words and symbols in any form, spoken or written, are the
most common system of communication. They deliver the
most widely understood meaning to the greatest number of
people— accurately and in detail.
•It is very important to choose the suitable words and symbols
in your multimedia presentation. You will reward yourself and
your users if you take the time to choose the right words.
•However, what we concern in this unit is another aspect of
text, namely its appearance in multimedia presentation.
•Text is a visual representation of language, as well as a
graphic element in its own right. The study of how to display
text is known as typography. It concerns the precise shape of
characters, their spacing, the layout of the lines and
paragraphs, and so on.

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1 Character Sets
•As we may already recognised that, the visual
appearance of a piece of text can be in many
different forms, the basic meaning of the text will not
change. Fundamentally, a piece of text consists of
letters,digits, punctuations and other symbols. These
can be considered as abstract characters.
•Abstract characters in a particular language are
grouped into alphabets. For example, The alphabet
of English contains the upper case letters A to Z, the
lower case letters a to z, the digits and a number
of punctuations.

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•To represent text digitally, it is necessary to define a
mapping between (abstract) characters and the
values that are stored in a computer system. We call
this mapping a character set. The domain of this
mapping, i.e., the abstract characters are called
character repertoire and the values to be stored are
called the code values or code points. For example,
the commonest character set used in Hong Kong for
Chinese is big5. Its character repertoire contains
more than 13,000 characters and other symbols.

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1.1 Standardisation
•Clearly, if any systems want to communicated with
each other, they have to have a common language.
Text is the most widely used means of
communication among computer systems.
Therefore, a common character set is essential.
•The earliest widely accepted character set is ASCII
which stands for American Standard Code for
Information Interchange. The code range of ASCII is
7-bit, meaning that the code value can be stored in
7 bits. Therefore, at most 127 characters can be
coded. However, the character repertoire of ASCII
only comprises 95 printable characters. The values
0 to 31 and 127 are assigned to control characters.
Later, ISO adopted ASCIIB. as
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an standard (ISO 646).5
•Obviously, 127 values are not enough to code
many of the world’s languages.
•ISO produced a new standard ISO 8859 with 8-bit
characters. Actually, ISO 8859 has many parts.
Each part specifies a number of character sets.
•The lower 127 characters in all parts are identical
to ASCII.

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The major shortcoming of ISO 8859 is that it uses
only 8-bit values, therefore, the number of code
points is limited. To overcoming this, two
organisations have been working on multi-octet
character set standards since the beginning of
1990s:

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•Unicode produced a standard The Unicode
•Standard, Version1.0 in 1991. The latest version is
version 3.0 passed at the beginning of 2000.
Unicode uses 2 bytes to encode each character.
•Unicode attempts to specify a character set to
embrace all languages of the world. It is gaining
popular support nowadays.
•Unicode uses a process known as CJK unification
to handle h `anz`i Chinese characters. This is
needed because the number of code points is limited
and the Chinese characters used in different
countries and regions have many variations.
•The latest Unicode standard has more than 27484
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There have been many Chinese character set
standards before the Unicode. The following
character set standards are in common use:
•GB2312-80 contains 6763 Chinese (simplified)
characters plus other symbols.
•big5 contains 13053 Chinese (traditional)
characters plus other symbols.
•CNS11643-1992 contains 48027 Chinese
characters divided into a number of planes.
•HKSCS Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set
(previously HK GCCS) adds 3049 Chinese
characters into Big5.

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1.2 Encoding
An encoding is another level of mapping. It
transforms a code value into a sequence of bytes for
storage and transmission.

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2 Typefaces and fonts
•To display text, we need to have a visual
representation of the characters stored as codes in
the computer. In fact, each character may be
represented by many different glyphs.
•A typeface is a family of graphic characters with a
coherent design and usually includes many sizes and
styles.
•A font is a set of graphic characters with a specific
design in a specific size and style.
For example, the typeface used in this paragraph is
‘Times’. The font is ‘Times Roman regular 16 point’.
•The picture on the right illustrates the lead types that
are used before the computer age. In fact, it was the
Chinese who invented the character block printing. 12
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2.1 Measurements of the type

•When putting characters on to a page, we need to

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•The distance between the origin and the left side of
the bounding box is called left side bearing.
•As we all know, some of the lower case letters
extend upward, like b and h, while others extend
downward, like g, p and q.
•The height of the lower case letter without
ascender and descender is called the xheight.
•The height of the upper case letters is called the
cap-height.

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There are many fonts available. Five attributes are often used
for specifying a font:
•Family — fonts in the same family have a coherent design, a
similar look and feel. Here are some of the common families:
Times, Helvetica, Courier, Garamond, Univers
•Shape — refers to the different appearance within a family.
Compare the following shapes: normal (upright), sloped
(oblique ), italic, SMALL CAP
•Weight — measures the darkness of the characters, or the
thickness of the strokes.
•The names used to distinguish weight are not uniform
between type suppliers. The commonly used names are: ultra
light, extra light, light, semi light, medium, semi bold, bold,
extra bold, etc.

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•Width — the amount of expansion or contraction
with respect to the normal or medium in the
family.
•Size — unit is point. 1 inch = 72.27 point in
printing industry. 1 inch = 72 point in PostScript
systems.

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The table above illustrates the relation of width and
weight for the entire range available in the family
Univers.
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2.2 Classication of Typeface
•Typefaces can be classified in many ways. One
classification is understood universally: serif and
sans serif.
•Serif is the little flag or decoration at the end of a
stroke.
•On printed pages, serif fonts are used for body
text while sans serif fonts are used for headline
because the serifs helps guide the reader’s eye
along the line of text.
•Multimedia presentation are displayed on low
resolution screen where sans serif fonts will be far
more legible.

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2.3 Bitmap Fonts Versus Outline Fonts
Font formats can be divided into two main categories: bitmap
fonts and outline fonts.
•Bitmap fonts come in specific sizes and resolutions. Because
the font contain the bitmaps of the character shapes. The result
will be very poor if they are scaled to different sizes.
•Outline fonts contain the outline of the characters. They can be
scaled to a large range of different sizes and still have
reasonable look.
•They need a rasterizing process to display on screen.
•Nowadays, outline fonts are much more common than bitmap
fonts. There are two kinds of outline fonts: PostScript and
TrueType.
•All version of Windows support TrueType fonts. Windows3.1
and Windows95 require Adobe Type Manager (ATM) to display
PostScript fonts. PostScript printers have a number of resident
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PostScript fonts.
2.4 Measurements for Text Layout
•Leading is the distance between the baselines of
two adjacent lines. Common used leadings are 14
points for 12 points text, 12 points for 10 points text.
•Tracking is the spacing between characters in text
lines.
•Loose tracking means the space between
characters are wider. Less words can be put in a line
of text.

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•Kerning is the extra adjustment between two
specific characters. Normally, characters are place
one next to the other, i.e., the distance between the
origins of the adjacent characters is equal to the
character width. But due to the shape of the
characters, the space between certain characters
may look uneven, e.g., the A and v in the figure.
Therefore, we need to kern the characters.

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3 Using Text in multimedia
Picking the fonts to use in a multimedia presentation
may be difficult. Here are some suggestions:
• For small type, use the most legible font available,
decorative fonts are useless.
• Use as few different faces as possible in the same
work, but vary the weight and the size and using italic
or bold styles.
• In text block, adjust the leading for the most
pleasing line spacing. Lines too tightly packed are
difficult to read.

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•Vary the size of a font in proportion to the
importance of the message.
• In large size headline, do proper kerning so that the
spacing feels right.
• Explore the effects of different colours and of
placing the text on various backgrounds.

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3.1 Cross platform issues

•When you build your multimedia project on

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•Fonts are perhaps the greatest cross-platform
concern. If a specified font does not exist in the
target machine, a substitute must be provided. Some
cross-platform applications, e.g., Director, allow the
developer to specify the mapping of fonts.
•Different encodings on different platform is also a
big problem. Special characters may need to be
converted to bitmaps in order to be display correctly
on different platforms. Different systems and font
manufacturers encode different symbols in the
extended character set. For example, the code 165
may be a bullet () on the the Macintosh, the
character for Japanese yen in Windows.
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4. Exercises
1. Investigate your favourite word processor or
desktop publishing package to see:
• which of the following features are available:
leading, tracking, kerning, character width, font size
• how many outline fonts and bitmap fonts are
available
2. Experiment with your favourite word processor to
find out what is the best leading at a certain point
sizes, say 10, 12 and 14, and a certain fonts, for
example Times Roman, Arial and Courier, for a
normal text paragraph.

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