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RACE An abbreviation for Row-based ASCII-Compatible Encoding. A transformation technique to convert Unicode plaintext into ASCII plaintext so as to be compatible with ASCII-only cataloging methods.
radical A standardized character part or component of Han characters which is used for indexing in character sets, dictionaries, or encodings. There are 214 radicals.
radura The international symbol for a safe implementation of radiation or an object having been subject to radiation, but not radioactive itself. Either the leaves of the 'radura', or the entire symbol, are to be represented in green. The 'radura' has been designated as the international packaging identification for irradiated food.
ragged left Text which is set to end exactly at the right margin and not adjusted so as to end exactly at the left margin on every line.
ragged right Text which is set to start exactly at the left margin and not adjusted so as to end exactly at the right margin on every line.
RAM Abbreviation for random access memory (usually capitalized). The memory in a computer which can both be written to and read from.
range kerning See track kerning.
ranged left/right Lines of type which are aligned at the left/right margins.
raster data format See bitmap graphics format.
raster font Another name for bitmap font.
raster graphics format See bitmap graphics format.
raster input processor See RIP.
rasterize A process where a collection of data instructions representing an image or piece of an image is first converted to a bitmap (if not already a bitmap); and then the bitmap data is fed sequentially to a storage medium or writing device, usually a line at a time. This is the process used to convert PostScript or TrueType instructions from fonts, illustrator applications, and page layout programs into viewable images.
The conversion process is performed by a software program called a « rasterizer. »
rasterizer See rasterize.
.RAW file A binary data interchange format used between operating system services, utilities, and applications. It can include both text and images.
reader See viewer.
real estate A term given to the amount of visible screen or indicator area on a monitor, laptop screen, palmtop, or other terminal appliance.
ream A quantity of paper consisting of 480, 500, or 510 sheets.
Rebol A universal scripting language which is available for BeOS, Linux, MacOS, various versions of Unix, Windows, and other operating systems, developed by Rebol Technologies. It has similar capabilities to Perl. Rebol includes an XML parser.
recorder See marking engine.
recto Referring to right-hand, as in the right-hand page (or recto page) of a document or book.
reëncoding Installing a new encoding vector in a copy of a PostScript outline font before use.
reference mark A character or glyph like ©, §, ®, ¶ which denotes a special meaning either commonly known or from a footnote.
refresh Renewing the image on a display periodically.
registration marks specifically designed symbols placed on a document or page layout which enable process color and spot color negatives to be precisely positioned relative to each other.
regular Denotes a standard or reference typeface style within a typeface family, relative to which other style variations are compared. Example: Helvetica Regular.
regularize To make all corresponding strokes (Uppercase straight, lowercase straight, Uppercase curved, lowercase curved) the same thickness, within each stroke category, for all glyphs within a typeface design and, sometimes, only a particular script.
relative unit A unit of measurement which does not describe something absolute, but only something relative. Example: em, en.
relief printing A process whereby ink coats a raised surface (positive image) and is then transferred to a medium directly through contact. See lithography and offset printing for alternate printing methods.
rendering Converting outline instructions in a font to bitmap data, which is then painted on a medium for viewing or written to a file for later use.
replacement character A character designated for use if the requested character does not exist in a font character set or a font encoding. The substitution is carried out by an algorithm built into the application. (See '.notdef ' for a description of a similar concept which occurs within a font.) Most character sets or encodings do not have such a character designated (ISO 8859, for example), ISO/IEC/10646 and Unicode being the exceptions.
resident font A font which is effectively always resident in printer memory. How this is achieved may vary: it may be directly accessed by the printer software from a chip or from a hard disk or other data storage medium. The opposite is a soft font, which must be downloaded at the time of use.
resolution A measurement of how precisely a pixel-based output device can reproduce an image. It specifies how small a pixel can be painted on a medium (film, paper, computer monitor screen). The resolution unit is pixels per inch, which usually is called « dots per inch » (abbreviated dpi). Resolution can be different horizontally and vertically. In that case, two numbers should be specified. Early computer screens had resolutions of 72 dpi, but screens have been introduced which can produce up to 200 dpi. Laser printers range from 300 × 300 to 2400 × 2400 dpi. Imagesetters range from 1000 to 4800 dpi. Film recorders range from 1200 to 16,000 dpi. An output device (other than a computer monitor screen) with unequal horizontal and vertical resolutions should be avoided. It is problemmatical with rotated characters (as with image equivalence in portrait vs. landscape orientations) and with halftoned images. Resolution can actually be defined in several ways. See addressable resolution, interpolated resolution, and resolution enhancement.
resolution enhancement A scheme of raising the apparent resolution of a laser printer by modulating the power to its laser so as to change the size and location of the projected light spot. By overlapping larger spots along a curved edge, curved edges of a solid area can be made to look smoother, as if reproduced by a greater number of smaller spots that would be present in a higher resolution device.
retro type(face) Any typeface design which was popular and widely used in the past, not currently enjoying significant usage in the present, but is being brought back.
reversal typeface A typeface designed to be used with letterforms or glyphs represented in a shade or color lighter than the background, rather than the more usual darker glyph on a lighter background. The glyphs, however, do not actually render in a reversed fashion. They are designed to be filled or painted in a lighter shade than the background. Typeface designs which are designed to render as lighter letterforms on a darker background included in the glyph are called reversed structural style. Reversal typefaces must be designed differently, having nothing to do with the rendering medium resolution. The reason for this is due to the effect of the darker background opening up the iris of the eye, much like decreasing the f-stop of a camera lens. The end result is the same: a reduction in image acuity. Therefore, when a small pointsize is used, the letterform images do not appear as distinct and readable. The cure for this is to thicken the strokes, decrease the contrast and stress, alter the type color, modify the pair kerning if necessary, and lengthen the serifs of a typeface design. However, since the effect of visual impairment diminishes as the point size gets larger, the eye notices the changes made, so that these need to be scaled back at larger point sizes. Therefore, reversal typeface designs need optical scaling to a much larger degree than their ordinary counterparts may need. At very large point sizes (such as for headlines), a special design for reversal is not needed.
Another difference between reversal typefaces and ordinary typefaces has to do with an opposite mitigation taken against medium artifacts. For example, the effects of press plugging on ordinary typeface dark-colored letterforms (ink-generated) on light-colored or white backgrounds is to thicken strokes, serifs, and terminals. However, the effect of light-colored (or white) letterforms (not ink-generated) on a dark-colored or black background (which is ink-generated) is to thin strokes, serifs, and terminals--the opposite. So, mitigation effects (like nicks, traps, or design alteration) added to the typeface fonts are different or opposite in design between an ordinary typeface and a reversal typeface. So, for a Multiple Master font, for example, having a density axis to control artifacts, the density axis would take an opposite approach between an ordinary typeface and a reversal typeface.
There are very few reversal typefaces designed, even though every ordinary typeface design should have a corresponding reversal design.
Reverse A typeface structural style where the glyph designs consist of a lighter or transparent letterform on a darker or opaque background. The dimension of the dark background for each character is the character width by the total height (above and below the baseline) of the font bounding box. The following sub-categories have been defined:
reverse Polish notation An instruction format in which the instruction name preceeds the variables and numeric data. The opposite is prefix or Polish notation.
revival A design which has fallen out of use, not generally available in a modern font format, or originally designed a long time ago with no revisions until reissued; and now being produced with revisions in a modern font format. An example is the Production First Software typeface: LafayettePF.
When a revival typeface is designed, the designer must preserve all of the essential design elements of the original design with great respect, going back to the original cuts if possible, and only "fixing" obvious errors found in the original cuts. This process is not always as simple as it seems.
RFC Abbreviation for Request For Comments (Internet usage).
RGB color space See color space.
ribbon commorative A colored glyph symbol, having the shape of a twisted looped ribbon, used to commemorate a specific cause.
Production First Software multibyte fonts store a 'ribbon' glyph, shaped and scaled consistent with the typeface design and style, in the Private Use Area at location <e00d>.
RIFF or RIF An acronym for Reversed Interchange Format File. A multimedia tagged data type file format used for Intel-style byte order data, and based on IFF (the same, except for Motorola-style byte ordering with interlacing for Amiga) which was developed by Electronic Arts Inc. in 1985. It can be used for images, text, audio, and other bitmap data. It is somewhat similar to TIFF, and it supports non-lossy compression.
rich text format See RTF.
right reading An image whose Roman alphabet text can be read from left to right. The opposite of wrong reading.
RIP Abbreviation for raster input processor (usually capitalized). A RIP consists of a PostScript interpreter (which serves to rasterize PostScript instructions from a print file) running on, most commonly, a dedicated microcomputer which connects to an output writing device. The RIP may be mounted inside a laser printer or film recorder, or inside a laser printer cartridge, or in a stand-alone (« tower » ) module. In display PostScript, the RIP resides on the host computer system.
RISC An acronym for Reduced Instruction Set Computer. A microcomputer architecture developed by IBM which uses a streamlined (reduced) set of instructions for implementation of standard system functions and services. The advantage of RISC over older architectures is speed and increased chip density. It was invented by IBM in 1970 but was never put into significant mass mainstream commercialization by IBM. Other computer manufacturers (including Digital Equipment, MIPS, Motorola, Silicon Graphics, and Sun Microsystems) started to develop and market RISC-based systems in the 80's. Compare with CISC and EPIC, which are older/slower and newer/faster technologies, respectively.
.RLE file See bitmap formats.
robot See crawling robot.
rollover A technique used in constructing Web pages which alters a graphic image as the mouse is rolled over that image. The feature is often used for selection buttons or navigation bars depicted on a Web page. Art so designed and constructed for that purpose is termed « rollover art. »
Rollovers require JavaScript, because a mechanism to achieve rollovers is not built into HTML or XML. Therefore, rollovers require browsers which can interpret JavaScript completely. Some browsers, like Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.x can interpret enough JavaScript for other uses, but not for rollovers. An example of rollovers can be found in the selection buttons on the home page of the Production First Software Web site.
ROM An abbreviation for read only memory (usually capitalized). It is computer memory which can only be read. Permanent computer instructions, such as those for an operating system, hardware controller, or most PostScript interpreters, are stored in ROM.
Romaji The Roman alphabet portion of a Japanese encoding.
root character A character which is defined fully in a root font.
root font The font or font structure with the highest hierarchical level in a composite font.
Roman This term is used interchangably with the term « Latin » for the basic alphabet used in most Indo-European languages.
(another definition follows)
roman A plain, upright (and more commonly serifed) letterform style.Roman Half-Uncial See uncial.
Roman Semi-Uncial See uncial.
Roman Rustic A design based on a calligraphic style derived by holding the pen at nearly 45 degrees. This results in narrow letterform widths and a design where the vertical strokes are extremely thin, and some diagonal and parts of curved strokes being much thicker.
Round or Rounded A typeface structural style sub-category where letterforms have rounded bowls. See categories under ISO/IEC/9541-1 Annex A.
round-trip Referring to a process, such as a mapping or translation, to go from original data to a backing store and then an inverse process to get back to the original data, identically. « Round trip incompatibility » means that this is not achieved.
Roman square capital The large and wide capital letterforms used by the Romans approximately 1 A.D. which evolved borrowing the Greek serif and the capability of a variable stroke width (from the adoption of the reed pen).
royal A metric document size of 508mm by 635mm (approximately 20 inches by 25 inches).
RRP An abbreviation for Registry Registrar Protocall. A method of processing text data which normalizes and maps data from a language-specific encoding into Unicode plaintext.
RTF An abbreviation for Rich Text Format. A standardized text format which includes instructions specifying text and font styles.
rubi See ruby.
rubii See ruby.
ruby Smaller sized kana characters used in Japanese, top aligned, which serve as phonetic modifiers, pronunciation aids, or change in meaning. They are somewhat analogous to the phonetic modifier characters of the IPA phonetic alphabet.
There are two types of ruby: mono ruby, in which the ruby characters are positioned in sequence according to the base characters they reference; and group ruby, in which a string of ruby characters references a string of base characters. Ruby characters are an example of interlinear annotation.
(another definition follows)
ruby 5 1/2 point typesize. Approximately equal to an agate.rule A horizontal or vertical line which is used to separate portions of text, tables, images, or other page elements for improved clarity and æsthetics. Rule thicknesses are generally expressed in points.
runaround See text wrap.
runaway quotes See errant quotes.
running foot or running footer A line of text which duplicates a line of text from another page but positioned at or near the bottom of a page.
running head or running header A line of text which duplicates a heading but positioned at or near the top of a page.
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