TEXT

Topics Covered
1. Introduction of text.
2. Text elements.
3. Types of text.
4. Fonts and typefaces.
5. Font Terminology.
6. Classification of fonts.
7. Font styles.
8. Font types.
9. Bitmapped and Vector fonts.
10. Font appearance.
11. Font mapping.
12. Guidelines of choosing fonts.
13. Efficient use of text.
Introduction
• Text is obviously the simplest of data types
and requires the least amount of storage.

• Text in the form of words, sentences, and

paragraphs is used to communicate thoughts,
ideas, and facts in daily life.

• Text may not be as visually exciting as some

of the other media types, but it often
conveys essential and precise information.
…continued
• Multimedia applications depend on text for many
things including:

Page titles
Delivering information in form of multiple sentences /
paragraphs
Labels for pictures

Instructions for operating the application

• Text is probably the most common form of

information delivery.
Text elements

 Alphabet characters
 A – Z and a – z

 Numbers
 0–9

 Special characters
 Punctuation (. , ; “ ‘ ! : - /)
 Signs ($ + - = @ # % ^ & *)
Obtaining Text

 Text can be captured in following ways:

 Keyboard
 Mouse
 Scanner (OCR) – Optical Character
Recognization*
* designed to translate images of handwritten or typewritten text
(usually captured by a scanner) into machine-editable text.
Types of Text

Unformatted text (Plaintext)

 comprise strings of fixed-sized characters from a limited
character set.

Formatted text (Richtext)

 comprise strings of characters of different styles, size
and shape together with tables, graphics and image
inserted at appropriate point.
 Example: Rich Text Format (RTF), HTML, .doc
Types of Text

Hypertext

 It enables the integrated set of

documents (each comprising formatted
text) to be created which have defined
linkages between them.
 Unformatted Text

This is a set of characters that

are available in the ASCII
(American Standard Code
for Information Interchange)
character set. This is one of
the most widely used character
sets and the table includes the
binary codeword used to
represent each character.

Basic ASCII character set

ASCII Code
ASCII Code
 Each character is represented by a unique 7-bit binary
codeword, meaning that there are 128 (27) alternative
characters.

 In addition to all normal alphabetic, numeric and punctuation

characters, the total ASCII character set also includes control
characters such as BS (backspace), DEL (delete), etc.
…continued
Extended Character Set (ISO Latin-1) Extended
– Extra 1 bit in ASCII is filled with ANSI (American Characters
National Standards Institution) characters (256 ¢  ä ü
characters)

Unicode
– Unicode is the universal standard for multi language
characters published by Unicode Consortium.
– Unicode 4.0 standard covers 96,382 characters Unicode
using 16 bits uniform encoding. Characters
– Unicode can support a wide variety of non-Roman
alphabets including Han Chinese, Japanese, Arabic,
Korean, Bengali, and so on.
‫ﺍﺏﺙﺚﺝﺡﺥ‬
αβγδεζ
Formatted Text

 An example of formatted text is that produced by most word

processing packages. It enables documents to be created that
consist of characters of different styles and variable size and
shape, each of which can be plain, bold, or italicized.
 In addition, a variety of document formatting options are
supported to enable an author to structure a document into
chapters, sections and paragraphs, each of which with
different headings and with tables, graphics and pictures
inserted at appropriate points.
Hypertext
Hypertext is a type of formatted
text that enables a related set of
documents, normally referred to
as pages, to be created which
have defined linkage points,
referred to as hyperlinks, between
each other.

Figure 2.3. Example of an electronic

Document written in hypertext
Fonts & Typefaces
 Font
 Collection of characters of different sizes and styles
of a typeface.
 Example : Arial 18 point Bold

 Typeface
 Graphic representation or the shape of characters.
 A typeface is a family of related fonts
 Example : Bookman Old Style
Fonts & Typefaces

 Tracking - Spacing between characters.

 Serif - Flag or decoration at the end of a

character stroke.
Classification of Fonts
•Spacing: monospaced (fixed width)/proportional

•Serifs: serifed/sans serif

Serifs are the small strokes added to the ends of character shapes in
conventional book fonts

•Shape: upright/italic/slanted
Slant is a vertical shear effect, italic uses different glyph shapes with a
slant

•Weight: bold/normal/light
 336

Font Terminology
 Cap height, The height of a capital letter measured from the baseline
 X-height, The height of lowercase letters reach based on height of
lowercase x; does not include ascenders or descenders.
 Ascender, An upward vertical stroke found on the part of lowercase
letters that extends above the typeface’s x-height.
 Descender, The part of the letters that extends below the baseline. 
 Body size, The complete area covered by all of the characters in a
font.
 Serif
Tracking
Ascender

BD hp
Av
Kerning
Descender

Reading line one. Leading

Reading line two.
 Kerning adjusts the space between
individual letter forms,
while tracking (letter-spacing) adjusts
spacing uniformly over a range of
characters.
Tracking and Kerning

AvUnkerned
Av
Kerned
Serif and sans serif fonts
 Fonts can broadly be said to be of one of two types:
serif or sans serif
 A serif is the decorative ‘bit’ at the end of a letter stroke
 Serif fonts have them and sans serif fonts don’t (‘sans’ being
French for ‘without’)
 Serif fonts are usually used for printed media or
documents that have large quantities of text.
 This is because the serif helps guide the reader’s eye along
the line
 Sans Serif fonts are considered better for computer
displays because of the sharper contrast.
Serif fonts Sans serif fonts

Times New Roman Arial

Bookman Old Style Tahoma
Monotype Corsiva Impact
Courier New Verdana
Font Styles

 Bold, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough, superscript or

subscript, embossed or shadow

 Colours
 Some common fonts used today include:
 Arial (or Helvetica)
 A sans serif font
 Times New Roman (or Times Roman)
 A serif font
 Courier New (or Courier)
 A monospaced font (all characters have the
same width)
Bitmapped and vector fonts
 Fonts can either be stored as bitmapped or vector

 Bitmaps require one bitmap for each size

 File size increases as more sizes are added.
 Require a lot of memory.

 Vector fonts can draw any size by scaling the vector drawing
primitives mathematically
 File size is much smaller than bitmaps.
 TrueType and PostScript are vector font formats.
Bitmapped and vector fonts

A bitmapped font A vector font

Font Appearance
Rasterization
 Font is drawn on the screen one pixel at a
time
 Jaggies are the jagged edges you see
when a bitmapped image is resized
 It is a consequence of the underlying array
of pixels from which the image is composed
Anti-aliasing
 Blend the font into the background color.
 This technique minimizes the jagged edges
making for smoother overall appearance.
 It substitutes additional pixels in other colours
to fool the brain into thinking it is seeing
continuous lines
Font mapping
 Some fonts installed in your machine may not
be available in other user’s machine.

 If the fonts that you used is not available in

other people’s computer, a default font will be
used for substitution.

 Specifying which font to be substitution is

called font mapping.
Letter case
(Lower and Upper case )

CAN YOU READ THIS? IF NOT IT IS BECAUSE EVERYTHING IS

WRITTEN IN CAPITAL LETTERS. THEREFORE THIS SHOULD ALWAYS
BE AVOIDED.

Can you read this? It is easier because people will recognize shape of
characters easier this way.

Can you read this? It is easier because people will recognize shape of characters
easier this way.
Meaningful words
 Text is use for titles and headlines, menus,
navigation, and content.

 Too much text – crowded or ‘busy’ screen

 Too little text – too many page

 Words must be chosen carefully

Guideline of choosing fonts
• For small type, do not use decorative fonts because in small
size they are unreadable.

• Use as few typefaces as possible but you can vary the size and
style using italic or bold.

• Adjust the leading or line spacing where you have a lot of text
for easier reading.

• Vary the size of a font according to the importance of the

message you are delivering.

• Use bold or emphasize text to highlight ideas or concept.

Guideline of choosing fonts
• In large headlines, adjust the spacing between letters
(kerning) so that the spacing feels right.

• Use anti-aliasing for big fonts but turn off anti-aliasing for
small fonts.

• Surround headlines with white space

• Distinguish text links with colors and underlining

• Use drop caps and initial caps

Efficient use of text
 Positive ways to communicate
message by less text and other ways
are
1. Hypertext
2. Pop-up Messages
3. Drop-down Boxes
4. Scroll Bars
5. Buttons for interaction
6. Symbols & Icons
Hypertext

• Linking a hypertext or hot word / hotspot to

another part of the title that displays more text

• Very effectively used to retrieve info from

databases

• Helps user in decision making

• User can process information faster and

strategically
Pop-up messages
• Another type of Hot word used to save
space

• Click on a hot word or a text, a small

message pops up explaining in brief about
the hot word

• Remains for some time and vanishes after

programmed duration or by a mouse click
Drop-down boxes

 Gives the user a set of choices and

reduces his strain of decision making

 That is making choice in an easier way

and limited according to the system’s
capabilities

 Choosing may lead to another page with

text or may retrieve info from database
Scroll Bars

• Usually not a good practice to use scroll

bars

• Mostly irritates the user

• Important messages should not be

posted using scrollbars, since the user
may not notice it
Buttons

 The concept of hyper linking remains

the same

 Change in appearance by using a

button with text to glow on it rather than
using a hyper text
Symbols & Icons

 Using symbols or icons in-order to

express a meaning

 Eg: A floppy icon in MS Word

represents “Save”, expressing to save
the document
Summary
1. Introduction of text.
2. Text elements.
3. Types of text.
4. Fonts and typefaces.
5. Font Terminology.
6. Classification of fonts.
7. Font styles.
8. Font types.
9. Bitmapped and Vector fonts.
10. Font appearance.
11. Font mapping.
12. Guidelines of choosing fonts.
13. Efficient use of text.
Summary
1. Text is the simplest of data types and
requires the least amount of storage.
2. 3 categories of text elements:
Alphabet characters, Numbers, Special
characters
3. 3 types of text:
Unformatted text, Formatted text, Hypertext
4. Font is the collection of characters of different
sizes and styles of a typeface.
Summary
5. Typeface is the graphic representation or the shape of
characters.
6. Font Terminology:
Baseline, Leading, x-height, Ascenders/Descenders,
Kerning, Tracking, Serif
7. Classification of fonts:
Spacing, Serifs, Shape, Weight
8. Font types:
PostScript, TrueType, Bitmap
Summary
9. Bitmaps require one bitmap for each size.
 File size increases as more sizes are added.

 Require a lot of memory.

10. Vector fonts can draw any size by scaling the vector
drawing primitives mathematically.
 File size is much smaller than bitmaps.

11. Rasterization refers that font is drawn on the screen one

pixel at a time.
Summary
12. Anti-aliasing blends the font into the background
colour to minimize the jagged edges making for
smoother overall appearance.
13.Font mapping specifies which font to be substitution if
the
fonts that you used is not available in other people’s
computer.
14. Positive ways to communicate message by less text:
Hypertext, Pop-up Messages, Drop-down Boxes,
Scroll Bars, Buttons, Symbols & Icons.