A book for the technical typographer

Posted by Daniel Stout on Mon 8 Oct 2007 at 10:36 PM

There seems to be a divide between the worlds on traditional and digital typography. If you’re interested in the former, you’ll read Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. There are a couple of approaches to computer typography. You can focus at the GUI level – applications like InDesign have a lot of typographic features built-in. With OpenType fonts now fully in the mainstream, there are a lot of built-in facilities for applications to insert ligatures or numeral variants and other high-end typographic features.

But another tack to take is technical typography. This deals with issues of fonts in the OS and character sets and encoding. O’Reilly has a new book for the technical typographer called Fonts & Encodings. The book is by Yannis Haralambous and translated into English by P. Scott Horne. It looks to be a pretty thorough treatment of the topic, and at over 1,000 pages it should be.

Here’s the table of contents:

1. Before Unicode
2. Characters, glyphs, bytes: An introduction to Unicode
3. Properties of Unicode characters
4. Normalization, bidirectionality, and East Asian characters
5. Using Unicode
6. Font Management on the Macintosh
7. Font Management under Windows
8. Font Management under X Window
9. Fonts in T_EX and Ω, their installation and use
10. Fonts and Web Pages
11. The History and Classifications of Latin Typefaces
12. Editing and Creating Fonts
13. Optimizing a rasterization
14. Enriching Fonts: Advanced Typography

Tags: books · encoding · fonts · o'reilly · yannis haralambous

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