Fonts & Encodings: From Advanced Typography to Unicode and Everything in Between

as reference books go, fonts and encodings is a good read. i find it invaluable, but it probably isn't for everyone. if you're the sort of person who requires a reference book on fonts and encodings, then this is what you need. if you never give it a second thought, i would recommend giving this book a read, it's fascinating.

More and better explanation than I've found in the last 10 years of searching. Beautifully written

It's great to see such a thorough book on the subject.The coverage of Unicode is good and written in plain English.The book covers history and technical implementation details, with many examplesof usage. There is also coverage of East Asian scripts (CJK).I liked finding the sections on modifying keyboard layouts and managingfonts on Mac OS 9, Mac OSX, Windows XP, and X Windows (including GNU/Linux).The information on X11 is not complete, but still very good.Oddly, the author uses the term "X Window," which should in my opinion be X, X11,X Window System or X Windows. This is probably due to pressure not to use the word"Windows," although "X Windows" is the common term.The sections on TeX, SVG and Postscript are invaluable, and there is even infofor creating and publishing your own custom fonts to browsers.Overall, I would say that the book is an invaluable reference for anyone who dealswith fonts, typography and i18n issues.

This is surely the definitive work on the topic, and manages to be readable as well.The chapters cover: Before Unicode; Introduction to Unicode; Properties of characters; Normalisation, Bidirectionality, and East Asian characters; Using Unicode; Font management; TEX; Web pages; History of typefaces; Creating fonts; Rasterisation; Advanced typography. The appendixes cover Font formats, TrueType instructing, Bezier curves.The author is a Macintosh user and so, refreshingly, gives equal coverage to OS-X, Linux, and Windows. I can't vouch for the Windows material, but the Linux information is sound, if a little dated in places.