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Word | Description |
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RTF |
RTF (Rich Text Format) is a document file format for cross-platform compatibility. Text may be saved independently of platform and word-processing prgramme. All information about layout is preserved. Attention: "Microsoft Word" has introduced various incompatibilities between versions of RTF! |
Combining diacritical marks | Accents and other marks -- diairesis (trema), etc. -- that modify alphabetic characters and are used in combination with them (cf. "dead keys" on typewriters). Accented characters in Unicode fonts may be displayed either by conpilations of such combining characters, each with its own code (in which case they are called "decomposed characters") or by single characters that combine the basic glyphs and the various combinations of diacritical marks that occur with them, represented by a single code ("precomposed characters"). |
Precomposed |
Term describing characters that combine basic alphabetic glyphs with combinations of accents and diacritical marks (decomposed characters) in a single character represented by a single code. These "precomposed characters" are found in the Private Use Area (PUA) of many Greek unicode fonts. Because current browsers and word processing software do not handle decomposed characters consistently or well (e.g., overlapping accents and characters), precomposed characters offer an interim solution for controlling the presentation of such composite characters. A consortium of scholarly font producers who work with Unicode polytonic Greek has agreed to use Private Use Area (PUA) code points for special characters that are not recognized by Unicode. This convention is followed, for example, in the fonts of American Philological Association Unicode fonts (e.g., GreekKeys), Ralph Hancock's Antioch package, in Juan-José Marcos' ALPHABETUM, and in David Perry's Cardo. Because of this agreement, users should be able to shift among the various fonts that comply with this convention, at least for characters that these fonts have in common. (This statement adapted from the APA online Technical Support for GreekKeys) NOTE: Characters encoded in the PUA that are unique to a particular font can not be represented in other fonts when conversions from one to the other are undertaken. |
Private Use Area (PUA) |
Unicode's Universal Character Set (UCS) reserves 137,468 code points for private use. For these ranges, the Unicode standard does not specify any characters. These code points can be used for non-standard characters by individuals, organizations and software vendors. Ranges of code points for private use are included in several planes within the UCS. For example, the Basic Multilingual Plane includes a PUA in the range from U+E000 to U+F8FF (57344-63743). NOTE: Characters encoded in the PUA that are unique to a particular font can not be represented in other fonts when conversions from one to the other are undertaken. |
Unicode | Platform-independent coding standard for for all alphabets (Latin, Greek, Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese,...) in which characters are identified by unique identifiers called "code points." |