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Haas-type transcription A well-received method of transcribing Thai words using the Latin (Roman) alphabet. It was developed by Dr. Mary Haas, the author of Thai-English dictionaries.
The advantages of the Haas-type system is that it:
(1) maintains consistency between words;
(2) shows tone marks;
(3) preserves relative vowel lengths; and
(4) produces spellings which are consistent with usage and common sense.
Newer systems have come into use which use the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is included in Unicode and ISO/IEC/10646 text encodings.
hacek A diacritical mark. Also known as a « caron. » Example: « s » with a « caron » - š.
hairline The thinnest stroke in a letterform or glyph.
hair space A space equal to 1/1000 of an em in Production First Software fonts. It is useful for kerning letterspacing with application software which cannot perform the same function any other way.
hairline space See hair space.
hairline rule The thinnest line which can be displayed or printed successfully.
In monochrome digital devices (both screens and printers), the thinnest line is the width or height of a pixel. In color devices, the situation is less clear, because a color hue is produced by using more than one primary or process color simultaneously, each color being limited to the width or height of a dot or pixel; and the spatial relationship or separation between dots or pixels is also an influencing factor.
halant Another name for 'virama'.
half-bitting See dentation.
halftone or halftoned or halftoning Graying or coloring of a glyph or image by using a uniform field of small black or colored circular dots or other marks. Marks that have been used include squares, dashes, diamonds, lines, elliptical dots, crosses, and various open marks such as annuli. Each produces its own slightly different effect. The field of marks is called a « halftone screen, » from the analog photography era of actually using a metal or celluloid sheet looking like a screen in the optical path when making an enlargement. Depending on the size of the marks and their separation, the eye sees the field as a certain shade of gray (if the marks are black) or a tint (if the marks are colored). This is the process required to print photographs on a printing press. The smaller the marks and their separation, the higher the resolution of the printed image. Resolution is usually stated as « lines per inch » of the screen, which really means marks per inch. This unfortunate terminology was introduced because the first screens produced had lines, rather than dots or other marks, although lines are still uncommonly used for special effects.
Printing of color is achieved by overlaying halftoned images of cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and other colors. In order for this process to work satisfactorily, all the images must be in register, and the various colored marks must be properly aligned between colors. Failure to do this results in a moiré pattern not present on the original image.
Halftoning is the mechanism used for color printing by printing presses and some hard copy color printers. Most hard copy color printers, however, use a less precise process called dithering to achieve the same end because it is less processng-intensive, more effective at very low resolutions, and helps reduce the cost of the printer. An enhancement of halftone screening for the electronic era is called supercell screening. A newer, different type of screening is called stochastic screening.
halftone screen A field or array of marks which are modulated by an image to represent shades of gray. Simple halftone screens contain marks separated by uniform distances, which results in a constat pitch or frequency. The sizes of the marks in a simple halftone screen are all equal. This is termed as having constant amplitude. Therefore, a simple halftone screen has constant frequency and constant amplitude. A monochrome image screened with a simple halftone screen has a varying frequency and varying amplitude, because unscreened images have varying amplitude, and the image has modulated the screen.
Half-Uncial See Uncial.
half up or half-up A layout or illustration 50% larger than the final production size.
half-form character A form of a consonant character glyph without its vertical stem (when acted upon by a 'virama'). It is found in certain Indic scripts.
half-width character A letterform glyph which is half-em in width.
half-width character A character in a Japanese character set whose width is narrower than a full-width or square character. Roman alphabet characters embedded in Japanese character sets are considered half-width.
Han The general name applied to an ideograph used in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other ideographic-based writing systems. These historically were of Chinese origin.
hangul or hanguel The writing system used in Korean.
hand A term which refers to a personalized style or personalized expression of a script in calligraphy.
handicapped user See print legibility for the visually-impaired and Unified Web Site Accessibility Guidelines, and Web accessibility guidelines. See also intelligent agents.
hand-tuning The process of altering glyph images by hand to make them appear optimal by eye on a viewing system. Most frequently, hand-tuning is accomplished by editing a bitmap so as to make it display better at small sizes. Hand-tuning may also refer to placing hints by hand in outline descriptions of glyphs so as to coax a rasterizer to produce a more desirable glyph appearance at various viewing resolutions of the output device.
Sometimes, other methods can be used to improve glyph appearances, such as anti-aliasing. Exampes of both techniques can be seen below. It can be seen that both techniques applied together do not always provide the optimum results.
handwriting See cursive writing.
handwriting font A typeface design which is obtained by scanning in samples of handwriting and deriving letterform glyph designs from the scanned samples. The typeface would be classified as Informal style.
Han folding See Han unification.
hanging Refers to any type of mark or non-alphanumeric character positioned in a margin and not aligned with the body of the text. Examples: hanging indentation, hanging hyphenation, hanging punctuation, etc.
hanging baseline An elevated baseline used as a reference from which glyphs are positioned or stacked vertically downward. The term specifically pertains to the way glyphs are arranged in the Indic scripts.
hanging indentation See hanging
hanging hyphenation See hanging.
hanging punctuation See hanging.
hanja Korean for « Han character. »
handaku Small marks added to the northeast (upper right) location of katakana elements, used to represent voiced consonants. The marks resemble a degree symbol ( ° ) for "p". See also dakuten.
hankaku See half-width character.
hantzu See hanzi.
Han unification A process of identifying all ideographs from Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese collections to be placed in an encoding; and then consolidating each ideograph from the four which has the same meaning and a similar appearance, and assigning a single code point. Ideographs which remain from the consolidation process must be encoded individually.
The Han unification process significantly reduces the number of characters representing ideographs which must be encoded. There is a minor but significant typographic problem in dealing with Han-unified characters: about 40% of them exhibit Nationality style variation. For example, the glyph visual design may be slightly different for Chinese and Japanese. A font which is intended to be used by all the ideographic scripts must include all variants of these glyphs, and then have a mechanism available to select the proper Nationality variations. This is a case where the so-called character/glyph model concept is important.
Arrangement of the unified Han characters within an encoding is a related, but separate, problem. Since each of the three languages has its own dictionaries and national encoding menthod, but since the collection of unified ideographs is somewhat different, a specific method must be used to order them. Han unification is used in both the ISO/IEC/10646 and Unicode standards. The Han unified characters start at <4e00> and end at <9fff> (20902 characters). These are in the Basic Multilingual Plane. Addditional characters are assigned in higher planes, in particular, plane 2 (the « Supplental Ideographic Plane. » ) The method used to catalog unified Han ideographs is referred to here as the « Han unification model. »
Han unification model The scheme used to catalog Han ideographs into a unified set. The ordering of the Han unified characters was done by consulting four major dictionaries [KangXi Zidian, 7th edition, Zhonghua Bookstore, Beijing (1989); Dai Kanwa Ziten, Revised edition, Taisyuukan Syoten, Tokyo (1986); Hanyu Da Zidian, First edition, Sichuan Cishu Publishing, Chengdu (1986); Dae Jaweon, First edition, Samseong Publishing Company Ltd., Seoul (1988) ] in a priority order, and starting by radical and stroke count. Each ideograph is categorized using three attributes: semantic, abstract shape, and typeface. These attributes are assigned X-axis, Y-axis, and Z-axis locations, respectively, in a Three-Dimension Han Unification Model plot. Ideographs are unified generally only on the basis of same abstract shape attributes (Y-axis). A set of rules is used to resolve whether differences observed in the four dictionaries are due to different inherent abstract shape or simply typeface attributes, the latter being ignored for unification purposes.
hanzi Chinese for « Han character. »
HDML An abbreviation for Handheld Device Markup Language. An early form of WML.
HDSL-2 An abbreviation for High Speed Digital Subscriber Line, Version-2 or Hign Bit Rate DSL. A higher speed version (close to T1 speeds) of DSL.
head The space across the top of a document. Also known as a « top margin. »
header Information, such as: title, chapter, chapter name, report number, date, or page number, listed above the main text area of a page.
header Data containing source and target addresses and error-checking sums which precede the actual variable data to be transmitted. The header and associated variable data is sometimes called a « packet. »
header file Another name for preamble.
Headwriter The product name for a Varigraph tracing device.
Hebrew Extended A Production First Software Hebrew character set which includes composite characters, some wide letterforms, additional ligatures, cantillation marks, quotation and punctuation marks, and additional symbols not in the Extended Hebrew character set.
helper application A utility, applet, or application which is launched by the active utility, applet, or application. An generic example of this is a Web browser launching the Windows Media Player in order to play a sound file embedded in a Web page.
hershey font See vector font.
Hexachrome A six process color system developed by Pantone Inc. in 1994 to improve the color rendition obtained by using process colors. While the standard four process colors can reproduce about 50% of the standard PMS colors, Hexachrome can reproduce 90% or more.
Hexachrome is a variant of the HiFiColor system, where 2 or more additional colors are added to the standard process colors. The advantages of these systems are that, if a number of colors are required which are outside of the reproduceable gamut of CMYK, only 2 additional process colors need be added, rather than one spot color for each additional difficult color.
hieroglyph A symbolic pictorial or glyph (Greek: hieros [sacred] + glyphe [carving] ) representing an idea, syllable, sound, or word.
Hieroglyphs can be found in Egyptian, Hittite, and Mayan writing systems. Hieroglyphs were probably first used by ancient Egyptians to communicate in place of an alphabet and spelling. See also ideograph.
HiFi color A set of more than four process colors used to improve the color rendition of color visual displays and color printing, along with the use of stochastic screening to eliminate the effect of moiré. HiFi color systems consisting of up to eight process colors have been used (usually cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y), black (K), orange, and green), but a popular choice as of this writing has been the Pantone Hexachrome system.
The HiFi color concept was developed because the standard set of four process colors (cyan, magenta, yellow, black) cannot represent all colors within the gamut of the human visual limit. Since many large commercial color presses permit more than four colors to be printed (four process colors and some additional spot colors) the switch to using more process colors is easy in terms of printing.
The advantages of HiFi color are:
(1) The reproducible color gamut is much wider, which means more colors can be printed.
(2) More ink can be laid down on the medium, which means the colors can be more intense.
However, some difficulties are introduced with the adding of additional process colors:
(1) Most of the traditional methods of proofing (color key, Chromalin, Iris ink jet) will not be accurate unless they incorporate the additional process colors. Inexpensive ink jet printers with the added colors still do not proof well because they utilize dithering rather than halftoning.
(2) Because of the additional process colors, moiré would be more prevalent if conventional halftone screening (instead of stochastic screening) is used in the separations.
(3) If stochastic screening is used, the dot gain mechanism is different and somewhat unfamiliar to traditional printers.
hinting The term, applied mainly to scalable outline printer fonts, used to describe the process of altering the location and/or shape of a character outline so as to improve its appearance when represented by low to medium resolution pixel-based or raster output devices. Hinting is made necessary by the fact that a character outline shape aligns along pixel boundaries, rather than lie where it should. As the resolution drops, the pixels get bigger and the jaggies appear. Although part art and part science, hinting is an algorithmic process, sometimes implemented partially or entirely in the font, and sometimes in the application or system software driving the hardware.
An example of hinting implemented in system software would be Adobe PostScript interpreters. PostScript interpreters use an intelligent scheme for identifying letterform glyphs and other graphic shapes, and then locating the shapes in relation to the addressable pixel grid of the output device in the process of converting the shapes into bitmaps. The specific detail varies with the commercial product, but basically a « wire frame model » of the glyph is first made. This serves as a locus of points from which a mapping of candidate pixels necessary to represent a shape is made. This pixel map is then « tuned » to minimize the pixel map shape differences relative to the mathematically-described shape of the glyph.
The term « hinting » is also applied to the act of specifying PostScript instructions in a discretionary manner so as to achieve the desired hinting process in a font. Hinting, as well as other processes involving the use of a font, is time-consuming. However, once a font character's outline is cached, the hinting process has already taken place and never needs to be repeated unless the cache is distroyed. Hinting is not usually required for resolutions 600 dpi (dots per inch) or greater, unless the character size drops below 6 points. A rule indicating when hinting becomes absolutely necessary is when point size × resolution drops below about 4000. With some typefaces, any combination below 8000 may require hinting. As laser printers achieve higher resolutions, the importance of hinting will be reduced. The implementation of hinting for low resolution raster output devices like computer monitor screens is different, and a different strategy is required than for other output devices.
hiragana A syllable-based collection of phonetic elements used to write Japanese words. About 60% of the characters used in Japanese typically are hiragana. The remaining are kanji, katakana and Roman.
hobo sign A a glyph which is part of a collection of shared vocabulary common to American hobos, originating in the early 20th century.
hojo A term referring to kanji characters in character set supplements.
home page or homepage A text document written in HTML and widely used as the presentation format of the World Wide Web. Strictly speaking, the first document which presents when a Web site is viewed is called the home page, the word « home » connoting « origin. »
HotDog A Web browser developed by Apple Computer Inc.
HotJava A Web browser developed by Sun Microsystems Inc.
hot key A key which activates an application which stays loaded in computer memory at all time.
HotMetal or Hot Metal An authoring program by SoftQuad.
hot type or hot metal type A term designating cast metal type which is actually used on a printing press. The alternative is « cold type, » which usually refers to photocomposition or other computer-driven typesetting methodologies (including desktop publishing).
Typesetting machines utilizing hot type technology include the Linotype, Ludlow, Monotype, and Varityper machines.
hotspot A portion of an image serving as an
house style The style of document layout (including typefaces, pointsizes, kerning data, punctuation, hyphenation and justification, indentation, heading presentation, table formats, table of contents and indexing, pagination, document structure order, etc.) used by a business, company, or organization to help maintain an identity and insure uniformity.
HPGL An abbreviation for Hewlett Packard Graphics Language. A printer description language and also a metafile format developed by Hewlett-Packard.
HTML An abbreviation for HyperText Markup Language. A text « markup » (or « tagging » ) language originally developed for the World Wide Web. The concept was derived partially from character-based typesetting systems originating a few decades ago and partially from SGML, a markup language developed about 10 years ago for creating documents. The beauty of markup languages is that the documents written in them are pure ASCII text and human-readable. Thus, they are inherently platform-independent, and can be opened and viewed on any operating system (even MS-DOS) easily, and the contents understood by humans. A convenient feature of current software supporting HTML is that body text formatted width is readjusted on-the-fly when viewing, depending on the width of the viewing window. This is in contrast to the way ordinary documents are handled by word processors and page layout programs (fixed format). HTML currently supports only the ISOLatin-1 character set, and this causes some problems even in English. For example, single or double typographic quotes do not exist in the ISOLatin-1 encoding. That is why they cannot be used in Web documents designed to be cross-platform. Instead, European quotes ( « and » ) are used, because they are defined in ISOLatin-1.
See also references to DHTML, JHTML, SGML, SHTML, and XML.
HTML+TIME An abbreviation for HTML+Timed Interactive Multimedia Extensions. An XML-based application developed by Compaq, Macromedia, and Microsoft to be able to time multimedia events in Web pages. The syntax is similar to XML. It is a competing technology with SMIL.
http An abbreviation for hyper text transfer protocall. A communications protocall of the Internet whereby a browser sends a network message to a server whose location is specified by the http address. The server then provides or returns the service or document requested using the http protocall.
Http is not the only communications protocall usable on the Internet. Others include ftp (file transfer protocall), telnet (telephony networking), news (UseNet service), mailto (Internet electronic mail service), wais (wide area indexing system), gopher (a text-oriented document-linking service), and file (file service on a server or local host).
Humanist See Old Style for serifed typeaface designs or sans serif.
Hybrid A typeface structural style which is a combination of Blackletter Formal and Venetian Serif, first used in late 15th century designs.
hybrid alphabet An alphabet which includes letterforms from more than one basic alphabet or script. Examples include the alphabet used by Azerbaijani (Cyrillic and Roman), Bushman (Africa), Burushaski, the eastern European language Chuang (Cyrillic and Roman), the native American language Delaware (Greek and Roman), Hausa (Africa), Hausa (Africa), Hottentot or Nama (Africa), Kano, Katsena, Mende (Africa), Sohoto, and Twi (Africa). Many African alphabets include both basic Roman and IPA letterforms. These technically are not hybrid alphabets because most of the IPA alphabet letterforms are based on Roman letterforms. A more complete list of hybrid alphabets can be found under « languages » .
hybrid press See direct imaging.
hybrid script A script which uses a hybrid alphabet.
hybrid serif See wedge serif.
hypertext The text in a document which includes a capability to jump (or link) from one location in a document to another location, or from one document to another document. It can be implemented using HTML.
hyphen A dash, usually slightly shorter than a 'minus', used to separate the syllables of a word in some scripts. Syllables may be separated for illustration purposes or when a word must be broken up at the end of a line of text.
Some encodings separately encode the 'hyphen' and the 'minus'; but some do not, due to historical and back-compatibility considerations. For example, ANSI, EBCDIC, later additions to ISO 8859, ISO/IEC/10646, Macintosh, and Unicode specify a 'hyphen' or 'hyphen-minus' at code position <002d>. The original versions of ISO 8859 specified a 'minus' at <002d> and a « soft hyphen » at <00ad>. Macintosh encodes 'minus' at <001c> but 'notequal' at <00ad>; Unicode and ISO/IEC/10646 encodes « soft hyphen » at <00ad>, 'hyphen' at <2010>, and 'minus' at <2212>, resolving the ambiguity. ANSI encoding also encodes a 'hyphen' at <00ad>. Some page layout programs use the 'hyphen' at <002d> and some use the hyphen at <00ad> for splitting words at the end of a line, again due to history of prior use.
Production First Software fonts include a 'hyphen', 'hyphennb', and a 'minus'. The default encoding places 'hyphen' at <002d>, <00ad>, and <2010>; a "non-breaking hyphen" ('hyphennb') at <2011>; and a 'minus' at <2212>. Operating systems and/or software which can reëncode fonts may place them differently.
hyphenation The process of hyphenating a word at the end of a line during page layout or word processing. The process can be manual or automatic. With automatic hyphenation, the application software must: (1) identify the last word in the line; (2) look up the word in a hyphenation dictionary to ascertain how the word can be hyphenated; (3) determine where to hyphenate the word for optimum line length; and (4) insert a hyphen character at the end of the line of text. If justification is also being done, the point of hyphenation and the spacing between characters and between words on the line must all be optimized together. This process may also be done considering an entire paragraph, rather than by looking at isolated lines.
hyphenation dictionary A database of words separated into syllables. Messaging, word processing, and page layout software looks up words in the database to determine how to hyphenate them at the end of a line of text. Hyphenation dictionaries are required for each script or alphabet that may be used.
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