Traditionally, character's under Unix were encoded in a locale-specific manner: ISO 8859-1 in Western Europe, ISO 8859-2 in Eastern Europe, EUC-JP in Japan, etc. In the 1990s, there was a major push to get XFree86 (the ancestor of X.Org) to switch to locale-independent UTF-8, lead mainly by Markus Kuhn and Bruno Haible.
The link is to Markus Kuhn's web page, which appears to describe the UTF_8 software available around 1998 or so.
UTF-8 is not locale independent. You cannot correctly render multilingual UTF-8 text without also specifying its locale, and some transformations like uppercase/lowercase also depend on the locale.
True, but following the early documentation from around 1990, from companies like Microsoft, most programmers use the term "font" even when they should say "typeface".
Many of those who know the difference between "font" and "typeface", still use "font" when addressing to programmers or to computer users, for fear that those would not understand other words.
In TFA, the uses of the word "font" are correct, e.g. in "The 6x13, 8x13, 9x15, 9x18, and 10x20 fonts", because it is used to refer to typefaces scaled to a certain fixed size (e.g. "Tahoma" is a typeface, while "12-point Tahoma" is a font).
The word "typeface" is used once in TFA, also correctly, when saying that whether typefaces may be copyrightable depends on the country.
5 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 18.3 ms ] threadTraditionally, character's under Unix were encoded in a locale-specific manner: ISO 8859-1 in Western Europe, ISO 8859-2 in Eastern Europe, EUC-JP in Japan, etc. In the 1990s, there was a major push to get XFree86 (the ancestor of X.Org) to switch to locale-independent UTF-8, lead mainly by Markus Kuhn and Bruno Haible.
The link is to Markus Kuhn's web page, which appears to describe the UTF_8 software available around 1998 or so.
Many of those who know the difference between "font" and "typeface", still use "font" when addressing to programmers or to computer users, for fear that those would not understand other words.
In TFA, the uses of the word "font" are correct, e.g. in "The 6x13, 8x13, 9x15, 9x18, and 10x20 fonts", because it is used to refer to typefaces scaled to a certain fixed size (e.g. "Tahoma" is a typeface, while "12-point Tahoma" is a font).
The word "typeface" is used once in TFA, also correctly, when saying that whether typefaces may be copyrightable depends on the country.