summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/Master/texmf-dist/doc/generic/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-whatenc.html
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'Master/texmf-dist/doc/generic/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-whatenc.html')
-rw-r--r--Master/texmf-dist/doc/generic/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-whatenc.html78
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 78 deletions
diff --git a/Master/texmf-dist/doc/generic/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-whatenc.html b/Master/texmf-dist/doc/generic/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-whatenc.html
deleted file mode 100644
index 6beb24750c6..00000000000
--- a/Master/texmf-dist/doc/generic/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-whatenc.html
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,78 +0,0 @@
-<head>
-<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label whatenc</title>
-</head><body>
-<h3>What are encodings?</h3>
-<p/>Let&#8217;s start by defining two concepts, the <em>character</em> and the
-<em>glyph</em>.
-The character is the abstract idea of the &#8216;atom&#8217; of a
-language or other dialogue: so it might be a letter in an alphabetic
-language, a syllable in a syllabic language, or an ideogram in an
-ideographic language. The glyph is the mark created on screen or
-paper which represents a character. Of
-course, if reading is to be possible, there must be some agreed
-relationship between the glyph and the character, so while the precise
-shape of the glyph can be affected by many other factors, such as the
-capabilities of the writing medium and the designer&#8217;s style, the
-essence of the underlying character must be retained.
-<p/>Whenever a computer has to represent characters, someone has to define
-the relationship between a set of numbers and the characters they
-represent. This is the essence of an encoding: it is a mapping
-between a set of numbers and a set of things to be represented.
-<p/>TeX of course deals in encoded characters all the time: the
-characters presented to it in its input are encoded, and it emits
-encoded characters in its DVI (or PDF) output. These
-encodings have rather different properties.
-<p/>The TeX input stream was pretty unruly back in the days when Knuth
-first implemented the language. Knuth himself prepared documents on
-terminals that produced all sorts of odd characters, and as a result
-TeX contains some provision for translating the input encoding to
-something regular. Nowadays,
-the operating system translates keystrokes into a code appropriate for
-the user&#8217;s language: the encoding used is often a national or
-international standard, though many operating systems use &#8220;code
-pages&#8221; defined by Microsoft. These standards and code pages often
-contain characters that can&#8217;t appear in the TeX system&#8217;s input
-stream. Somehow, these characters have to be dealt with &#8212; so
-an input character like &#8220;&#233;&#8221; needs to be interpreted by TeX in
-a way that that at least mimics the way it interprets &#8220;<code>\</code><code>&#8217;</code><code>e</code>&#8221;.
-<p/>The TeX output stream is in a somewhat different situation:
-characters in it are to be used to select glyphs from the fonts to be
-used. Thus the encoding of the output stream is notionally a font
-encoding (though the font in question may be a
-
-
-<a href="FAQ-virtualfonts.html">virtual font</a>). In principle, a
-fair bit of what appears in the output stream could be direct
-transcription of what arrived in the input, but the output stream
-also contains the product of commands in the input, and translations
-of the input such as ligatures like
-<code>fi</code>.
-<p/>Font encodings became a hot topic when the
-<a href="FAQ-ECfonts.html">Cork encoding</a>
-appeared, because of the possibility of suppressing
-<code>\</code><code>accent</code> commands in the output stream (and hence improving the
-quality of the hyphenation of text in inflected languages, which is
-interrupted by the <code>\</code><code>accent</code> commands &#8212; see
-
-<a href="FAQ-hyphen.html">&#8220;how does hyphenation work&#8221;</a>).
-To take advantage of the diacriticised characters represented in the
-fonts, it is necessary to arrange that whenever the
-command sequence &#8220;<code>\</code><code>&#8217;</code><code>e</code>&#8221; has been input
-(explicitly, or implicitly via the sort of mapping of input mentioned
-above), the character that codes the position of the &#8220;&#233;&#8221; glyph is
-used.
-<p/>Thus we could have the odd arrangement that the diacriticised character in
-the TeX input stream is translated into TeX commands that would
-generate something looking like the input character; this sequence of
-TeX commands is then translated back again into a single
-diacriticised glyph as the output is created. This is in fact
-precisely what the LaTeX packages <i>inputenc</i> and
-<i>fontenc</i> do, if operated in tandem on (most) characters in
-the ISO Latin-1 input encoding and the T1 font encoding.
-At first sight, it seems eccentric to have the first package do a thing, and
-the second precisely undo it, but it doesn&#8217;t always happen that way:
-most font encodings can&#8217;t match the corresponding input encoding
-nearly so well, and the two packages provide the sort of symmetry the
-LaTeX system needs.
-<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=whatenc">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=whatenc</a>
-</body>