name A property of characters which identifies them by name. For example: the name of <0026> is 'ampersand' and its glyph is & . The International Organization for Standardization has published a list of standardized character names, most of which are more than one word (like 'LATIN CAPITAL LETTER E WITH CIRCUMFLEX' for Ê ). For practical purposes in fonts, a different set of names is used. For the previous example, 'Ecircumflex' is the name actually used.
Naming characters can get very political: for example, what script should be used to spell out a character name for, say, a Greek letter in a font? With the advent of Unicode, it is possible to spell out names in data files in many languages. In some scripts (like Cyrillic), the same name may refer to different characters, depending on the country, and some characters use different names in different countries.
namespace or name space The collection of names for a specific entity. The entitiy can be characters, glyphs, code points, etc.
narrow bandwidth device A device such as a telephone and wireless (analog and digital) cell phone. A narrow bandwith device is one which can receive and selectively use signals throughout a relatively narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (in some cases, only a single frequency).
natural language A signed, spoken, or written language of an intelligent being. Examples include: American sign language, braille, Chinese, English, French, and Klingon.
Natural Unical See uncial.
navigation The act of manually moving a cursor from text character to text character.
Navigator The name of a popular Web browser developed by Netscape Corp. The source code of the latest version, as well as executables, is available for free from Netscape's Website.
NC See network computer.
NCR An abbreviation for Numerical Character Reference. A method of specifying text characters using decimal numbers in some markup languages, specifically HTML, SGML, and XML.
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NCR Short for NCR, Inc., the current name of what used to be called the National Cash Register Company. NCR also developed and built a line of mini- and mainframe computers. Currently, it develops and markets banking and point-of-sale systems.
NCSA Abbreviation for National Center for Supercomputer Applications. A research center at the University of Illinois where the MOSAIC Web browser was originally developed.
nekudot A mark which serves to modify consonants in Hebrew script, usually to indicate vowels or pronunciation. Sometimes considered to mean the same as point.
Neo-grotesque See sans serif.
netcasting The sending of data periodically and asynchronously from a broadcasting server across a network (ususally the Internet or an intranet) to a target client or user. It is one of the processes classified as push technology.
network computer See thin client.
neutral character Also referred to as a « neutral. » A character which is designated as being usable for more than one writing direction (bidirectional to quad-directional), as for both a left-to-right script and a right-to-left script. Neutral characters usually take on the direction properties of the surrounding text characters, irrespective of context. Examples of neutral characters are various types of spaces (standard 'space', layout spaces, no-break space, etc.), and, possibly, some punctuation characters. See weak character for comparison.
NeoPlanet A Web browser developed by Bigfoot International Inc. It is available for free from the Bigfoot Website.
NewsML A markup language which is designed for organizations that distribute news. It enables audio, static images, text, and video to be uniformly tagged in a common format so as to be accessible from the Internet.
n-graph A combination of four or more letters which represent a single phonetic or sound, but are manipulated as a single letter or element in spelling. See related terms digraph and trigraph.
nibble One half byte (or 4 bits).
nick A hairline-thickness serif extending diagonally out from the corners of character outlines. This hairline disappears in a photographic exposure, leaving a clean-cut square corner. Mainly used on phototypositor and some photocomposition fonts.
A nick in font glyphs used in preparing photographic images works by producing the correct image (lacking the nick) on the film. A corresponding technique, intended to actually reproduce the nick on the medium (paper or a signage medium) works by envoking a different mechanism: compensation for a lack of human visual acuity for distant objects.
nigori Small marks added to the northeast (upper right) location of katakana elements, used to represent voiced consonants. The marks resemble a rotated double quote ( " ) for "b", "d", "z", "j", and "g", called « dakuten » ; or a degree symbol ( ° ) for "p", called « handaku » .
no break space See non-breaking space.
node A point on an outline where the mathematical properties of the outline change. In simpler terms, a boundary of an outline curve segment.
Nom The Vietnamese Han-based character set of ideographs.
non-breaking space A space which prevents a line from being broken at that position, which could happen with a standard space.
non-combining character A character whose character glyph usually does not combine visually with another character glyph, except when forming ligatures.
non-linear display order A term applied to text in a writing system or script in which character glyphs do not display or sound in the same order in which they exist in the text string.
non-linear scaling The Microsoft term for a hinting technique which adjusts the scaled size of a glyph partially so as to improve the appearance at low resolution representation. For example, more sidebearing space may be added than actually called for based on mathematical (linear) scaling. Adjustments covered by non-linearly scaling are sometimes considered to be a subset of changes made by optical scaling.
non-lining figures Numerals with some heights equal to lowercase heights and some heights equal to cap height or « figure height.»
non-lossy Same as « lossless. » Describes a process which may destroy a portion of data but does not produce an unreconstructable loss of data.
non-spacing character or non-spacing mark A character whose character width is zero or acts in that manner. Non-spacing characters include some diacritical marks and some vowels. Some encodings (like Unicode) include both spacing and non-spacing representations of diacritical marks. While the concept of non-spacing characters is clear, the practical implementation and use of them can be complex. For example, the shape of a diacritical mark glyph can influence the shape to be used for the base character, even when representing Latin (Roman) script. An example of this can be found in the Production First Software typeface LafayetteU0PF. The presence of non-spacing characters in a text string can also complicate the application of pair and track kerning; because it may require multiple passes for processing a portion of the string, to determine which characters are the base characters to use to determine the kern pair adjustment between glyphs, and then what diacritical (non-spacing) marks follow a base character, because that may also affect the kern pair adjustment. Track kerning adjustment is placed only between base character glyphs, so that the adjacent base characters in the text string must be determined.
'.notdef ' The character name of a special character glyph in a font which is substituted if a requested glyph does not exist in the font. This substitution is carried out by the software machinery of the font renderer or interpreter. In PostScript fonts, this is most commonly displayed as a 'space'. In TrueType fonts, it is most commonly displayed as a box, whose width is equal to the standard space and whose outline thickness depends on the thickness of a glyph stroke. A '.notdef' character glyph, however, could be designed to be any arbitrary shape, and can even be kerned. See also replacement character.
notdef font A font which has only one or more notdef character glyphs in it. A notdef font is sometimes used by composite fonts to provide for missing character glyphs.
NSCII Acronym for Nom Standard Code for Information Interchange. A 16-bit (2-byte) encoding standard based on ISO/IEC/10646, but adding 1775 additional ideographic characters.
NTON An acronym for National Transparent Optical Network. A fibre-optic computer network, also called the Supernet, capable of data transmission rates of 10-20 gigabits/sec. It was developed by Ames Research Center, Bay Area Rapid Transit, California Institute of Technology Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, GST Telecommunications Inc., Nortel Networks, Sprint, and University of California Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in 1999. It was considered to be the next-generation Internet.
numeric value class A property of characters which assigns a numerical value to those characters representing digits in a particular script. For example, the value 1 is assigned to <0031> (Latin script), <0660> (Arabic script), <0e51> (Thai script), <2170> (Roman numeral I), etc. Characters which do not represent digits are not assigned a value.
Nuskha-Khutsuri See Khutsuri.
nukta A diacritical mark similar to a 'dotbelow' and used in certain Indic scripts.
Nuskhuri Another name for the Khutsuri alphabet of Georgian.
nut British name for the en.
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