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backslanted A typeface style produced by skewing or inclining an upright typeface design towards the left (for left-to-right writing direction). By convention, positive skewing angles are measured clockwise, so that a backslant angle would be greater than 0 degrees.
ball or ball terminal The end of a stroke which is shaped like a filled circle whose diameter is larger than the width of the stroke. Typeface examples in which this is found include: Bernhard Cursive, Bodoni, and Palace Script.
Baltic With respect to font technology, a term usually referring to character set support for Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian (such as ISO 8859-4 or Windows CP1257) which support Latin characters required for those languages. This designation does not apply to Production First Software Language Group character sets, because those support languages based on the actual characters required without any geographic proximity considerations.
banja A term denoting 2-byte Latin (Roman) script characters.
banner A title line using large size type which extends across the entire document or page.
(another definition follows)
banner On the Internet in the World Wide Web, a rectangular (width greater than height), usually animated, graphic which displays across the top of a page, most commonly for the purpose of displaying a paid advertisement.barcode An image consisting of a series of lines of varying width (one-dimensional barcode) or a rectangle with an appearance of a random pattern (two-dimensional barcode) which is machine-readable and which serves to store data.
Some of the barcode formats and schemes (called « symbologies » ) permit ocr numerals or letterforms below the barcode image. A number of symbologies exist. One-dimensional symbologies include: Universal Processing Codes, (Code 39, Code 128, Interleaved 2-of-5 and others), EAN codes, ISBN, ISSN, FIM and PostNet Postal barcodes, American Railway Association barcode (painted on the side of railroad cars), and others. Two-dimensional symbologies include: PDF417 (developed by Symbol Technologies Inc. in 1989), Maxicode (developed by United Parcel Service in 1989), Data Matrix (developed by International Datamatrix), and Code One (developed by Laserlight Systems Inc.). The 2-dimensional symbologies can store anywhere from 60 to over 2,200 alphanumeric characters, depending on the format. So many characters can be stored that the 2-dimensional symbology can also be used as a messaging medium. Some 1-dimensional barcode scanning software can be upgraded to recognize 2-dimensional barcodes.
Barcodes are widely used in product labeling, and can be computer generated either by utilities or directly in page layout programs or word processors using barcode fonts.
barcode font A font resource designed to be used with special applications, page layout programs, or word processors to produce images of barcodes. These images can be part of a label design or just the barcode alone.
base character A single character in text or in a font which is not composed of any other characters (or which cannot be decomposed into more than one character). E is a glyph corresponding to a base character, but É is glyph which does not correspond to a base character but corresponds to a composite character.
base font A font which is stand-alone and fully-defined, and therefore can be used by itself.
base glyph A glyph representing a base character.
baseline An imaginary reference line running along the lowest non-curved portions of characters such as b, d, A, E, etc.
baseline alignment The most common method of positioning type characters by means of their baselines.
baseline erosion A characteristic of Arabic typography where the baseline continually and gradually falls from right to left until the next word. For Arabic typography to be correctly represented, this characteristic must be included.
Basic Multilingual Plane This term denotes the first 65,536 characters, or plane 0, of the ISO/IEC/10646 character set. This plane is intended to encode all significant scripts and graphic symbols of the world currently in-use.
.BAT A type of IBM PC-compatible file which contains operating system commands and/or commands to start a computer program.
batch file Another name for a .BAT file.
Bauhaus The German school of architectural design originated by Walter Gropius in 1919. It became famous by its application of science and technology to art, furniture design, and interior design. Typeface designs were also produced, which were influenced by that design era.
BDF File or BDF Abbreviation for Bitmap Distribution File. A file format where each character is described or represented using a bitmap instead of another type of image representation, such as outline printer font formats.
BDF format is a cross-platform format, and comes in two varieties: human-readable ASCII text (the most common) and binary (uncommon). The most common use of this format is under Unix, where it is the standard bitmap graphics file format.
beak One-sided serif attached to a stroke. Examples: E, F, T.
beard The space between the baseline and the descender line.
bed The base upon which rests type bodies and blocks.
Be Internet Appliance (BeIA) operating system A version of the BeOS for Internet appliances. It is considered the much more advanced Be counterpart to Microsoft WindowsCE.
bento container or bento storage A data storage method and specification developed by Apple Computer in 1993 for data. It consists of grouping several types of data (audio-video, database, graphics, publication, text, etc.) on a related topic in a single resource capsule or container, which can be moved as a unit.
The name « bento » is a Japanese word that denotes a lunchbox with a number of compartments.
Benton pantograph A mechanical tracing device developed by Morris Fuller Benton (at ATF) which could modify a letterform design for optical scaling considerations. Many different adjustments on various design parameters (such as stroke width, x-height, advance width, ascender height, cap height, etc.) could be automatically « dialed in » during the tracing procedure.
Be Incorporated The company, founded by ex-Apple official Dr. Jean-Louis Gassée, which developed probably the most sophistocated, efficient, and user-friendly microcomputer operating system, the BeOS. In mid-2001, Be Inc. was purchased by Palm Computing, the pioneering manufacturer of handheld Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) products. Since Be had already introduced a superior operating system designed specifically for Internet appliances (the BeIA), and since Palm did not have an operating system of any depth or especially noteworthy characteristics, it seemed likely that the BeIA might be offered on some PDA products. The fate of the BeOS remains unknown at this writing.
Be Operating System (BeOS) An operating system designed by Be Incorporated for Intel Pentium and PowerPC chips. The operating system has complete multithreading, a 64-bit file system, object-oriented design, native Internet services, and Unicode-compliancy. It is the first new operating system with a graphical user interface design since 1986. It is currently the only operating system with a graphical user interface which can run on both Intel/IBM PC-compatible and Macintosh hardware.
Berne and Pan American Copyright Convention The international copyright agreement which provides protection to creators of artwork, writings, and photographs against unauthorized use.
The Copyright Convention does not cover trademarks and patents. The essential difference between copyrights and patents is that a copyright covers only the expression of an idea and not the idea or underlying information itself; whereas a patent covers the underlying idea, and not the actual expression or implementation of it.
Bézier curve A curve, commonly used to represent portions of a letterform outline in fonts, which is represented by a third order Bézier spline polynomial. A feature of Bézier splines is that the shape of a curve segment is governed by off-curve (control) points, rather than on-curve points. Bézier splines were originated for representing the complex multidimensional surface shapes in the design of automobile bodies.
bicameral alphabet An alphabet having two cases, usually UPPERCASE and lowercase. For definitions of other cases, see case.
bidi An acronym for bi-directional (writing capability).
bidirectional A term applied to a script, text, writing capability, writing direction, or writing system having both right-to-left and left-to-right elements.
big endian or big-endian See byte ordering.
big font Microsoft terminology for a multibyte (TrueType) font which includes a large number of scripts.
Bigfoot An Internet browser and portal, also called NeoPlanet, developed by Bigfoot International Inc. The browser is available free from its Website.
.BIN file See bitmap formats.
bitmap graphics format A graphical image format which stores image data by pixel.
BisTalk Microsoft's version of XML. It was developed as an attempt to control the evolution of XML.
bitmap A term used to identify a collection of data (map) which represents an image by describing a large number of small units of area (bits) of that image, each area of which is either painted in a specific color or left unpainted.
bitmap data formats The following are bitmap image formats described as follows: (platform, widely used for, format administrator, date originated, last update)
bitmap font A font containing glyph images produced using bitmaps.
blackboard bold See doublestruck.
Blackletter or black letter A typeface structural style patterned after calligraphy using a broad-tipped pen and gothic script calligraphic style of Northern Europe. The following categories and sub-categories have been defined:
Formal - Large x-height; little or no curvature in strokes; and condensed design. This style mimics the ecclesiastical manuscript style of calligraphy used in recording the Bible.
:Sans Serif - Without serifs. Typeface examples include ITC Honda, Rumford.
:Serif - With serifs. Typeface examples include: Cloister Black, Fette Fraktur, Kufi, Miyabi, Old English Text.
:Sans Serif Engraved -
:Serif Engraved - Typeface examples include English Shaded and Steelplate Text Shaded.
Round - Rounded shape of letterforms with bowls
:Sans Serif - Without serifs. Typeface examples include: Germania, Monmouth, Post Roman.
:Serif - With serifs. Typeface examples include: Academy Text, Becker, Bradley, Lautenbach.
:Sans Serif Engraved -
:Serif Engraved -
See also Fraktur, which is a variety of Blackletter.
Hybrid - Combination of Blackletter Formal and Venetian Serif, first used in late 15th century designs.
:Sans Serif - Without serifs. A typeface example is Venetian Text
:Serif - With serifs. A typeface example is Monastery Text.
:Sans Serif Engraved -
:Serif Engraved -
Informal - Having letterforms slightly unevenly positioned and slightly variable in size, so as to simulate informal handwriting.
:Sans Serif - Without serifs. Typeface examples include Dublin Text and Ondine.
:Serif - With serifs. A typeface example is Legend.
:Sans Serif Engraved -
:Serif Engraved -
blackness A property or parameter of a typeface design which is an appearance quantification, along with typographic color, which depends on the density of the typeface design (weight, amount of whitespace and size of counters), closeness of letterforms, and any other design properties which affect the ratio of letterform area extent to background. The distinction between blackness and boldness is that boldness only pertains to the actual weight of the typeface design whereas blackness includes influence by other factors.
bleed Text or graphics which project up to and beyond the defined boundaries of a page.
blind kerning A special case of pair kerning, where the same adjustment of space is made between any character and a specific character. Usually specified within an application.
block Material used as spacers (if nothing is engraved) or material engraved with illustrations, combined with bodies in setting up a page to be printed.
Block Set The name of a LanguageSuite, alphabet script, or character set which a font supports. This can be a set or combination of blocks as identified in the Unicode or ISO/IEC/10646 encoding standards.
Blue Gene An IBM supercomputer project, faster and more advanced than any previous supercomputer, targeted at being able to calculate and represent « protein folding. » It is designed as a vastly parallel processor, capable of 10**9 operations per second.
Blue Mountain A massively parallel processor (MPP) supercomputer, with a total of 6144 processors, built by Silicon Graphics Incorporated in 1999 with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. It consists of 48 SGI Cray Origin-2000 multiprocessor systems, of 128 processors each. It can achieve a computing speed of 3 teraOps, and was the fastest computer ever built as of 1999.
Bluetooth A technology protocall for local wireless networks developed by a number of companies (including Ericsson, IBM, Lucent, Motorola, Microsoft, and 3Com). Using Bluetooth, a laptop, cellphone, Walkman, or other appliance can all be interconnected without wires but independent from connecting using the Internet. Bluetooth operates on a special frequency band and has an interconnecting range of about 30 feet (10 meters).
.BMAP file A Macintosh screen font file. These files also contain metrics data.
BMP An abbreviation for Basic Multilingual Plane. See also SMP and SIP.
.BMP file A bitmap file format used for representing graphic images in Microsoft Windows. It has also been used to represent bitmap representation of fonts in Amiga. The bitmap .FON file format is usually used for bitmap fonts under Windows.
.BM01 to .BM99 files Typographic International font .BMAP files which contain widths and spacing information for only those characters in the character subset of a particular Language Group.
body In hot type, the slug of metal which contains a raised image of a letterform.
BOM or bom An acronym for byte order mark.
body size or bodysize In hot type, the vertical size of the body. This was originally measured from the top of the d ascender to the bottom of the p descender. This measurement eventually evolved into what is considered the point size of type.
body text The story or descriptive text of a document. Banners and titles are not considered to be part of body text.
bold typeface A typeface, typically used for headings, which has thicker strokes than an associated typeface used for body text.
bopomofo A set of phonetic elements used in Chinese. So named from the sounds of the first four elements.
bot Shortened form of the word « Webot. »
bounding box The largest imaginary box that can be drawn around a PostScript graphic element which just touches on all sides. This term can be applied to individual characters in a font, a collection of font characters, a PostScript EPS graphic, or an entire page description. A bounding box which can contain all the character glyphs and glyph combinations in a font is called a « font bounding box. » The dimensional units of a bounding box are usually expressed in PostScript points.
bouma A bouma is a word shape. Bouma theory implies that during intensive reading, word shapes are primarily read, and that letterforms within words are analyzed by the brain only if the word shape is not recognizable.
bowl The closed partially or completely curved portions of a character. O, P have bowls.
bracket See fillet and bracketed serif.
bracketed serif or bracked serif A serif attached to a stroke by either a curved or segmented straight line.
Brahmic scripts The Brahamic scripts are: Devanagri, Khmer, Lao, Myanmar (formerly Burmese), Old Thai, Thai, and Viêt Thai.
Bravo The initial name used by Adobe Systems Inc. for CoolType.
brightness A property or parameter of a typeface design opposite to the concept of blackness.
brilliance A property or parameter of a typeface design qualifying the amount of contrast present in a design.
.BRK file A proprietary bitmap format that stores group 3 FAX data.
BSML An acronym for Bioinformatic Sequence Markup Language, a markup language used to describe genome data.
BS 2961 Abbreviation for the British Standards Classification of Typefaces.
British Standards Classification of Typefaces A system of typeface classification developed in 1967 (BS 2961) which generally follows the Style Era classification system but with some differences. There is less distinction between Old Syle categories (with the Dutch-English Old Style not defined) and more sub-categories in the sans serif category. Additional categories of Glyphic and Graphic are included. In addition, significance is applied to the general shape characteristics of serifs and some general design differences in certain letterforms.
The category designations are as follows: I - Humanist; II - Garalde; III - Transitional; IV - Didone; V - Slab-serif; VI - Lineale; VII - Glyphic; VIII - Script; and IX - Graphic.
broadcasting A misappropriated term in electronic data communication terminology. The current term is netcasting.
browser See Web browser.
browser user agent codes The parsable string identifiers of a Web browser, accessible through JavaScript.
Currently, the following substrings can be searched for (with some examples):
browser userAgent appName appVersion Microsoft IExplorer 3.x Mozilla/2 Microsof 2 Microsoft IExplorer 4.x Mozilla/4 Microsof 4 Netscape Navigator 3.x Mozilla/3 Netscape 3 Netscape Navigator 4.02 Mozilla/4 Netscape 4 WebTV 2.2.2 Mozilla/3 WebTV Pl 3Click here to determine the viewing browser's user agent codes.
BSD An open-source version of Unix developed in 1990 at the University of California Berkeley. Compared to Linux, it is not as advanced graphically, but more refined and stable kernel. It is the Unix flavor of choice for embedded systems, and many commercial versions of Unix (such as Apple OS X and NeXTStep486) were based on it.
Burgundian Minuscule See uncial.
bullet •
bustrophedic A property or writing direction with every other line having an opposite direction.
byte A unit of computer data storage which can be thought of as consisting of one character. Plural « bytes. » Abbreviated « B. »
byte ordering The physical sequential arrangement of bytes comprising a data integer in a file. Little endian (the so-called Intel-style) has the low order byte preceed the high order byte for an integer. Big endian (the so called Motorola-style) uses the reverse. Most MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows files use little endian. Macintosh and Unix files, as well as some 16-bit data formats (for PDF files, TrueType font files, and cross-platform Unicode text files) normally use big endian byte ordering. It has become a de facto standard to start a 16-bit file with a byte order mark if the file uses little endian byte ordering.
byte order mark A zero-width no-break 16-bit character (at <feff> for UTF-16 encodings) or or 32-bit character (at <0000feff> for UCS-4 or UTF-32 encodings) which can be used to detect byte order by comparison to the 16-bit code point <fffe> or 32-bit code point <0000fffe>.
byte polarity or byte pair polarity Another term for byte order, describing the physical sequence of low order to high order bytes in a data file.
.B01 to .B99 files Typographic International font .BDF files which contain widths and spacing information for only those characters in the character subset of a particular Language Group.
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