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Diffstat (limited to 'Master/texmf-doc/doc/english/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-whatenc.html')
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1 files changed, 16 insertions, 16 deletions
diff --git a/Master/texmf-doc/doc/english/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-whatenc.html b/Master/texmf-doc/doc/english/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-whatenc.html index 63939eba348..aa0b55306ac 100644 --- a/Master/texmf-doc/doc/english/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-whatenc.html +++ b/Master/texmf-doc/doc/english/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-whatenc.html @@ -2,9 +2,9 @@ <title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label whatenc</title> </head><body> <h3>What are encodings?</h3> -<p>Let's start by defining two concepts, the <em>character</em> and the +<p>Let’s start by defining two concepts, the <em>character</em> and the <em>glyph</em>. -The character is the abstract idea of the 'atom' of a +The character is the abstract idea of the ‘atom’ 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 @@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ 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's style, the +capabilities of the writing medium and the designer’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 @@ -28,13 +28,13 @@ 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's language: the encoding used is often a national or -international standard, though many operating systems use "code -pages" defined by MicroSoft. These standards and code pages often -contain characters that can't appear in the TeX system's input -stream. Somehow, these characters have to be dealt with - so -an input character like "é" needs to be interpreted by TeX in -a way that that at least mimics the way it interprets "<code>\</code><code>'</code><code>e</code>". +the user’s language: the encoding used is often a national or +international standard, though many operating systems use “code +pages” defined by Microsoft. These standards and code pages often +contain characters that can’t appear in the TeX system’s input +stream. Somehow, these characters have to be dealt with — so +an input character like “é” needs to be interpreted by TeX in +a way that that at least mimics the way it interprets “<code>\</code><code>’</code><code>e</code>”. <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 @@ -52,14 +52,14 @@ of the input such as ligatures like 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 - see +interrupted by the <code>\</code><code>accent</code> commands — see -<a href="FAQ-hyphen.html">"how does hyphenation work"</a>). +<a href="FAQ-hyphen.html">“how does hyphenation work”</a>). To take advantage of the diacriticised characters represented in the fonts, it is necessary to arrange that whenever the -command sequence "<code>\'</code><code>e</code>" has been input +command sequence “<code>\’</code><code>e</code>” has been input (explicitly, or implicitly via the sort of mapping of input mentioned -above), the character that codes the position of the "é" glyph is +above), the character that codes the position of the “é” 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 @@ -70,8 +70,8 @@ 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't always happen that way: -most font encodings can't match the corresponding input encoding +the second precisely undo it, but it doesn’t always happen that way: +most font encodings can’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> |